


in the territory of plausible deniability

by zetaophiuchi (ryuujitsu)



Series: je ne sais où on s'en va [2]
Category: SKAM (France), SKAM (TV) RPF
Genre: A series of unfortunate dinners, Angst, Character Bleed, Eurostar, Explicit Sexual Content, Flowers, Future Fic, Harry Potter - Freeform, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Mutual Pining, Pining, RPF, Slow Burn, The Emotional Intelligence of a Pair of Rocks, maxel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:58:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22961599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi
Summary: They begin again.Set after the events ofmy beloved in amber, in a kinder universe where Brexit was never even a possibility.
Relationships: Axel Auriant/Maxence Danet-Fauvel
Series: je ne sais où on s'en va [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1650046
Comments: 82
Kudos: 63





	1. old habits, et cetera

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously I love happy endings. It just takes a while to get there…

In another universe, he calls Axel, drunk on Christmas Day while Julie squeals over her presents, drunk on New Year’s Eve, barricaded in a bathroom stall while Joris leads his revelers in a merry countdown. In another universe, they don’t speak again for another five years. In another universe, he took the part of Thomas in _Lie with Me_, and Axel was his Philippe, and this schism need never have occurred.

In this universe, it’s Simon he calls, half-asleep on the awful red and black rug in Joris’ bathroom on the first of January, and Simon who comes to counsel him through the closed door.

“You okay?”

The sun is rising; a blue line of light encroaches on his bare feet, cutting his arches from his toes, creeping over the matted red corner of the rug. He is not quite sober.

“Simon,” he says, “_Simon_, I’ve ruined everything.”

“Fuck,” Simon says, “what a tone to set for the New Year. Unlock the door, please, Maxence.”

The sun is at his ankles now. He hugs his knees. “No.”

There is a murmur of voices beyond the door. A woman says, “Is there another…?”

Simon: “Sorry.” And Simon again, in answer to another whispered inquiry: “Having an existential crisis, I think.”

“Open up,” Joris says, with a thump: his fist or knee against the wood. “Maxence! I’m going to vomit. Get out of my bathroom.”

He gets up and unlocks the door. Joris barrels past, a blurry shape in a mossy black sweater, and doubles over the sink. Maxence slinks out and inserts himself under Simon’s waiting arm. He lets himself be led away. A crowd has gathered in the kitchen; one of Joris’ girlfriends has arrived with croissants, Léa or Théa, he’s forgotten. Her eyelids are smeared with pink glitter. She offers him a tired smile.

Eventually, Joris returns, wiping his mouth with glistening knuckles. With the same hand he grips the back of Maxence’s neck and massages.

“Any resolutions, my dear?” he says.

A year ago, he quit smoking: effort enough for a decade, he thinks. So his breath is sweet—and so is Joris’s, mint-fresh—as he leans in to receive a kiss on the cheek. (“Aw,” Simon says.) He says, “None.”

The Belphegor project is abandoned in February, but Lucas calls him back within twenty-four hours about the biggest opportunity of his life, shouting so loudly that Maxence jerks his phone away from his ear. After their trilogy in the Americas with _Fantastic Beasts_, Warner Brothers is bringing Harry Potter to France with a movie about Nicholas Flamel, the alchemist, the creator of the Philosopher’s Stone.

“It’s a period piece,” Lucas says. “Lots of robes, long hair, the works. You see, I told you I’d watch out for your hair!”

He sends in his tape. At the end of February, they call him in for a reading in a temporary office on the Left Bank. The casting director is a friend of Lisa Lhoste’s; the local executive producer’s only son is a longtime fan of _SKAM France_. “Jacob will be over the moon when he finds out,” she says. He signs a piece of paper, below a doodle of an eye, for her to take home.

There’s another callback in March, this time on the Thames. They offer to put him up in a nice hotel in Soho, but he declines; he has a seat on the eight o’clock Eurostar back to Paris that night. He's hurrying back to shoot a short film over the weekend, one of Joris’ projects, a bewildering arthouse sequence where a man sets fire to a cinema with an errant cigarette flick.

“I quit smoking,” he’d said, when Joris showed him the storyboards. “Remember?”

“It’s not quite the same effect,” Joris had replied, “throwing a nicotine patch at some nitrocellulose.” Then he’d smiled. “Worried you’ll be tempted?” he’d said. “You have more self-restraint than that.”

He hasn’t held or rolled a cigarette in months—not even a joint. He looks down between his fingers now as he walks between carriages, and something between hunger and pain fills the back of his throat.

When he looks up, he sees the café car menu; and Axel.

It’s a small world for actors in Paris. He’d been braced to encounter Axel again for weeks: Axel laughing at the center of a party, flanked by friends and admirers; Axel at the edge of the room, just saying his goodbyes, slipping away with a polite smile; Axel seated in the front row of a fashion show, expressionless beneath dark glasses and wild hair, in all instances unreachable and untouchable. But he didn’t, and he didn’t, and he didn’t, and slowly he’d stopped looking, stopped holding his breath every time he stepped through a doorway.

Here Axel is now, most unexpectedly, in gray sweatpants and big white tennis shoes, bent over a small paper cup of tea or espresso or chocolate, hanging up his phone.

Axel’s stare seems unusually luminous, even wet. But his grin is so broad and genuine and suffused with joy that Maxence hurries to him, exclaiming. They _bise_, quickly and precisely.

He’s signed a non-disclosure agreement about the Flamel audition, but he’s sure Axel can guess what he’s been up to. There’s a chance Axel’s been to an audition himself. He drops a few hints, traces a lightning bolt on the tabletop, but Axel remains blank. He doesn’t ask Axel what he’s doing, where he’s been, who he’s with. He wants to know; he’s afraid to find out.

“It’s good to see you,” he tells Axel instead. “Honestly.”

“You, too,” Axel says. For a moment, his face is perfectly controlled, perfectly relaxed, and then he bites his lip.

“I won’t bother you,” Maxence says. He nods over his shoulder at the menu. “I just came to…”

“No, wait,” Axel says. “I mean—stay if you want to.”

“You don’t mind?”

Axel gazes at him, unblinking. “Of course not.”

When they broke up, Mathilde left behind a copy of Andre Aciman’s _Find Me_. He’d flipped through it while gathering her things to send back to her—two boxes of books and clothes and brushes and makeup palettes, neatly taped, to be delivered by Simon and Natalia in exchange for his spare key. (“Like a hostage exchange,” Simon had said, and indeed, in the end, Mathilde had taken her boxes and mailed the key back to him in an envelope all by itself, like a severed finger.) In the first of four movements, an old man meets and falls in love with a young woman on a train: they talk openly, for hours, about all kinds of subjects. The journey takes place in Italy, in daylight.

Tonight, on the Eurostar, with the dark countryside shining through the long tinted windows, he and Axel talk copiously about nothing at all. He buys himself a hot chocolate and drinks it slowly, swiping his tongue over his teeth and wiping his mouth with a napkin again and again, self-conscious about leaving a brown film or brown creases in his lips.

Axel is adhering to his own nervous choreography. His posture is open but careful, his movements restrained. Just once, he starts to lean across the table, then catches himself and transforms the gesture into a jab at his cup, now empty. He makes an awkward joke about the poor French accent of a train conductor, who announces over the system that they will be arriving in Paris in twenty minutes.

“What are you doing tonight?” Maxence says, and Axel’s smile falters. “Do you have a lot of luggage? Let’s get a drink.”

“It’s late,” Axel says.

“Okay, old man,” Maxence says, teasing, and then he slaps his hand on the table as he remembers. Years ago, he’d recorded a video of himself singing over a cupcake: _Happy New Year and happy birthday, the big 2-2_. “Fuck,” he says. “Your birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday, Axel. Let me buy you a drink. Just one.”

“Just one,” Axel echoes.

He has to ask now. He holds his breath. “You’re not traveling with anyone?” he says. “They’re welcome to come too.”

“No,” Axel says. He goes back to his seat to retrieve his things. Thirty minutes later, loitering on the platform, Maxence stops dead, realizing Axel could easily give him the slip, sneaking past behind the bulk of a businessman in a black wool coat or the bulging mass of a family of five. But no, there he is, making his way against the crowd, pushing his case ahead of him, stepping lightly, his head held high.

They go to The Patient Backpacker just outside the station, seating themselves at the corner of the terrace. Two beers, quick as you please, and the fries with truffle.

“Extra truffle, please,” Maxence tells their waiter. “It’s his birthday.”

The waiter grins at them—he wonders if they’ve been recognized—and departs to do his bidding. When he turns back he sees Axel rolling his eyes over the lip of his glass.

“What?” he says. “You’re not on a diet, are you?”

“Are you?” Axel retorts.

“I’m under strict orders to grow my hair out as fast as possible,” he says. “That’s all.”

“Knowing you, it’ll be shoulder-length by tomorrow.”

“Ha, ha.” His hair is only just beginning to curl around his earlobes. He takes off his cap and runs his hands through the tangle self-consciously, noticing how Axel’s eyes track the movement.

Axel does lean across the table this time, all the way, to feel for himself. He rubs a section of hair between his fingers, close to Maxence’s left ear. The strands rustle over the noise of traffic and the bar and his drumming heartbeats.

It’s only after Axel clears his throat that he realizes he’s closed his eyes.

“Tired?” Axel murmurs.

“No.”

In another universe, he reaches up to clasp Axel’s hand with his own. He says, _Axel_, or maybe _Lucas_. In this one, he holds very still, and Axel withdraws, his knuckles rasping against Maxence’s jaw. His fingertips linger on Maxence’s sleeve before drifting over the metal filigree of the table. He shifts in his chair and groans. “I’m starving,” he admits.

As if on cue, their truffle fries are deposited between them, arranged architecturally in a steel cone. Under the heat of the lamps, Axel’s cheeks glow red.

Impulse seizes him, later, when the fries are eaten and their beers have been drained and replenished and drained again. He leaves a pile of coins atop the receipt, a few euros; pence, too, and the twelve-sided pound coin he’d squirreled away as a souvenir: what’s the point of keepsakes? When Axel’s Uber pulls up on the corner, he dives in.

Axel slides in through the opposite door. “Need a ride?” he asks, a little sarcastically.

“I’m heading the same way,” Maxence replies, shameless. He lives in the opposite direction, near the Canal de l'Ourcq, three floors above a tattoo parlor.

Axel blinks. “You moved? When?”

“What?” he says, with a dull thud of surprise. He hadn’t expected Axel to remember.

“To the eleventh arrondissement? Don’t tell me we’re actually neighbors.” Axel’s tone is light. Lighter still, he says, almost to himself, “Neighbors again.”

“No,” Maxence says. “I mean, yes, I moved, but tonight I’m going to see Joris. We’re filming in the morning.”

“Fuck,” Axel says. He glances at his smartwatch. “It’s so late, dude. You’re going to have circles under your eyes.”

“Like a raccoon for sure,” he agrees. He lets himself slur a bit—as though two beers could make him slur. It took him all of three months after Seven Little Crosses to regain his tolerance, three months and countless beers, ciders, and cognacs. And how many of those were sipped while meditating gloomily on Axel, whose presence beside him is lighting up the entire left side of his body like a live wire? Suddenly his slur becomes genuine, two parts excitement, one part panic, well-shaken. “Thanks for the ride,” he says, shivering. “You’re saving me a trip. Here, I’ll send you half. How much is it? Do you have Lydia?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I insist,” he says. “It’s your birthday.”

“Happy birthday, man,” the driver says.

“Thanks,” Axel says. He shakes his head. His smile is faint; it says, _I know what you’re doing. _He looks away from Maxence, out the window. It’s starting to rain.

It’s pouring by the time they roll up to Axel’s street. Maxence swallows as he notices the familiar cobblestones, the young linden trees by the curb, the huge vase in the concierge’s rain-streaked window, now filled with birch branches. The vase is gray in the darkness, but he remembers the sight of it, a soft mottled blue under direct sunlight, formerly housing a bunch of silky white freesias.

Axel clambers out, and Maxence follows. Slam, splash, slam. Their driver heaves Axel’s suitcase onto the cobblestones.

“Hey,” Maxence says, almost croaking, “can I come in?”

Axel’s stare in the brake lights is long and searching. His mouth forms the shape of Maxence’s name, and then he flinches as the driver slams his door.

“Umbrella,” Maxence says quickly. The Uber purrs off. “For an umbrella. If you have one.”

“Oh, of course, absolutely.” Axel’s response is high and singsong, like a child obeying a directive to mind his manners.

“Thanks. Really. Thank you. Here, let me—” He springs at the suitcase.

“No, no,” Axel says, intercepting him.

He looks at the rigid set of Axel’s shoulders as they climb the steps, wonders what he’s thinking. Maybe nothing. Maybe that his suitcase is heavy as hell. Maybe that Maxence is behind him, that the heat of Maxence is behind him, that all he has to do is turn. Let fall the damned suitcase and turn.

Axel unlocks his door and nudges his suitcase inside. He pauses in the foyer, blocking the way, and digs around in his shoe rack in the dark. Over his shoulder, Maxence sees the outline of Axel’s piano in a shaft of light from the window, a box of Belini mini-pizzas lying on its side on a coffee table. An old dog bed, sans dog. He starts to reach toward Axel, toward the small of Axel’s back.

“Axel…”

“Here,” Axel says, straightening up with an umbrella. It’s a thick, heavy-duty nylon printed with oversized, monochromatic, photorealistic florals, and if his mouth weren’t so dry, Maxence would laugh at it, at Axel and his fancy umbrella, with its polished wooden handle and hand-embroidered fabric tag, illegible in the murky light but probably reading Valentino or Givenchy.

He doesn’t take it. “It’s raining pretty hard,” he says. The wind is his friend, the wind is in support of his scheme—it gusts hard, rattling the branches outside. He looks at Axel and waits.

“Charlie’s coming back soon,” Axel says. “She’s at the bar with some friends, but…” He shakes the umbrella between them like he’s brandishing a crucifix. “Any minute now.”

The gust quiets. “Oh,” he says, in the silence. “You got back together?”

“Yeah, on—on New Year’s Eve. I…we…old habits, et cetera…” Axel stops. "Sorry."

“Why are you apologizing?” he says. “Don’t. That’s great. What a birthday present.”

“Yeah,” Axel says. He shakes the umbrella again. “Here," he says, "take it."

“Thanks,” he says. The nylon rustles as he squeezes it. Charlie's umbrella. “I’ll bring it back. I won’t forget.”

“It’s fine if you do,” Axel says. The blue flash of his gaze hits Maxence like a blow. “Forget, I mean.”

He decides to forfeit the staring contest before his eyes start to water. He dismisses himself, he turns, he reaches out blindly for the bannister. At any moment, he thinks, he’ll hear her, Charlène on the steps, keys jingling, bag swinging. He doesn’t want to see her. He doesn’t want her to see _him_, Maxence, slouching in the stairwell with her umbrella dangling from his hand like a wilted bouquet. He understands it now, that the warm, dull, baffling irritation he felt about Maxine in Seoul has transmuted itself into white-hot jealousy. There is nothing she can give you, he thinks, that I cannot also give you, and in fact, _in fact_, he thinks, remembering how Axel groaned as Maxence slid himself deep into his body, I can give you more.

“Good night,” he says, raw.

“Maxence,” Axel says, and he looks back and sees Axel standing so stiff and still that he could pass for the door frame, or the door.

“Yes?”

“Ah,” Axel stammers. “Ah, no. No, nothing. Good night.”

In the street, he passes a woman forging through puddles in a pair of platform sneakers, her face obscured by the clutch she’s using to shield herself from the rain. It might be Charlie, or it might not. If it is, she’s taller than he remembers. He doesn’t look too closely.

“For the love of God, Maxence,” Joris says. He’d opened his door wearing nothing but boxer-briefs. (“You don’t have a girl on the way too, do you?” Maxence had muttered, as he pushed his way inside.) “He was lying.”

“What was I supposed to do,” Maxence says. “Interrogate him? Check for women’s shoes?” He groans. Rubs his face. The rain has dried; his skin feels tacky. He’s already wincing about the umbrella, the Uber, all of it. Trying to barrel back into Axel’s life at 300kph. As though all ill-will and hesitation could be overcome by speed alone. Close your eyes, don’t think, leap. “God,” he says, into his palms.

The floorboards creak; then Joris claps him on the shoulder. He doesn’t look up. “Listen, I’m going back to bed. Your toothbrush is on the left side of the cabinet. Théa might have used it, sorry.”

He dreams that he’s back in his old apartment, in his old bed, which sinks as Axel crosses the room and lies down beside him, but no, it’s only Joris, settling down on the couch with a cup of coffee.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Joris says, handing over the cup. “Ready for some fireworks?”

For Joris has made friends with some former members of Féérie, who took home the silver prize in special effects at last year’s Cannes Pyrotechnics Festival. And after Maxence throws his cigarette today, he’ll put on a flame-retardant suit and be baptized by fire.

“I should call Mathilde,” Maxence says.

“Don’t,” Joris says. “She’ll forgive you.”

“I’m calling her,” he says, only half-joking, but when he digs his phone out from beneath the couch cushions, he sees that Axel’s texted him.

_Be careful tomorrow._ _Don’t burn that hair off before it reaches your shoulders._

Sent at three in the morning. He imagines Axel, turning his phone over and over in his hands, a liar lying sleepless in an empty bed of his own making. The floral umbrella is probably the property of his mother, blonde little Madame Auriant with her fashionable, expensive taste; he can see it already, dangling from her wrist. Axel and his Belini pizzas, he thinks: he wouldn’t eat those with Charlie around.

3:03 a.m.: _Not that you don’t look nice with short hair, of course._

He replies, _How about with no eyebrows?_

A few minutes later, Axel says, _Avant-garde, but still very charming, I’m sure. Hi._

_Hi._

“Mathilde?” Joris says, warily, when he returns to the living room straightening his collar and finds Maxence grinning at his phone. “Attaboy,” he says, when Maxence shakes his head no.

On set, fire blooms around him like hibiscus flowers, raking the arms and legs of his suit. They’ve only budgeted for one take. The entire shoot is over in less than six hours, and he waves away Joris’ offer of a late lunch and walks all the way home, sweating, his heart hammering.

_I survived_, he tells Axel, as he crosses the Saint-Martin Canal via footbridge. The mid-afternoon sun is pale but persistent. A breeze blows down from the west, from Montmartre.

Axel responds immediately. _Congratulations._

_First degree burns only._

_Shit, really? Are you okay?_

_I’m kidding. _He returns to the center of the bridge and leans over the weathered green railing, looking into the water. The reflections of the trees along the bank are furred with velvet buds. _Are you free tonight?_

A pause. _I’m having dinner with my mother_, Axel says finally.

Adieu to Charlie, to the brief fantasy of Charlie, who is even now probably walking through Paris, or Ibiza, or Bali, through her own life, without the faintest idea that last night, at one in the morning, César-nominated actor Axel Auriant tried to summon her like a virgin praying to Saint Agnès. He thinks to himself, _Your satisfaction, your smugness, it’s ugly. It makes you ugly. Stop._ But his smile breaks free anyway.

_And afterward?_

The stone banks of the canal are jammed with people walking, talking, sitting, eating. Laughing. Through the faintly acrid chemical smell still burning into his nostrils, above the slight stink of the water, he inhales the scent of spring. He opens his mouth to it.


	2. tonight or never

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Usually (being a writer and all) I’m impressed and delighted by plot twists that manage to take me by surprise, but a global pandemic was so far out of left field that it knocked me on my ass for two months. I’m still reeling. 
> 
> I’d written in the summary that this story is set in a kinder universe, where Brexit was never even a possibility. Well: this story is now marooned in a splinter-splinter universe, where COVID-19 never happened, and the streets of Paris are as crowded as ever.
> 
> I hope you are all well.

Maxence embarks on a campaign of seduction. It’s difficult, of course, when the object of his affections refuses to be nailed down, dodging invitations to dinner and drinks and parties with smooth, well-practiced phrases honed over nearly a decade—a decade, fuck!—of politely declining galas and screenings and casting calls. _Sorry, I can’t today. Sorry, tonight’s no good. Sorry, I’ll be in Nantes this weekend._

“Please tell me you’re not planning to show up with a bouquet,” Joris says.

“Do you think that would work?” He bites at a fingernail. “What kind of flowers?”

It’s been two weeks since he borrowed Axel’s umbrella. Two beautifully, unusually sunny weeks, clear and rosy, with spring creeping ever closer. The umbrella is lying at the foot of his desk now, gathering dust, while he has taken himself to Joris’ studio in the third arrondissement to review the footage of the weekend before. He sits beside Joris in a black computer chair, twirling and twirling so he can feel the cool air sifting through the hairs on his shins. Two black chairs, two cups of black coffee. Joris, hunched, his hand tight on the mouse, pauses a replay and looks at him a little sardonically, with a gleam in his dark eyes.

“You think this is funny,” Maxence accuses him.

“I do,” Joris says. Four clicks of the mouse. “People move on, you know.” He looks up: Maxence has leapt to his feet, almost involuntarily, sending his chair spinning. He laughs, shakes his head. “It’s been, what, a week? Two? Be patient. Under no circumstances buy a bouquet.”

Or a one-way ticket to Nantes, Maxence thinks. One fortuitous meeting is enough; now you must wait, and do your time like all the rest of us, in lovers’ purgatory.

He thinks back to Mathilde, to Amandine before her, and Camille. The progression has always been simple: a drink, a kiss. He’s never had to do more than pause, and smile, and lower his gaze just the littlest bit. A swoop of the eyelashes, an adjustment of the tilt of his neck; he’s done the same for the cameras. He’s never purchased flowers, though flowers have been purchased for him before, or more accurately, succulents, ivies, ferns. He’s never had to ask twice.

He texts with determination, ignoring Joris’ smirk. _You’re difficult to schedule, M. Auriant. After Nantes, then. Let me know when you’re free._

Then he yanks the computer chair back to the computer and flops into it, joggling his leg, watching his phone, chewing his lip and making monosyllabic noncommittal answers to Joris’ questions about transitions and filters.

_Tuesday_, Axel says. _Tenth of March._

_45 Jean Jaurès_, he says. _Number 403. At 8?_

No pause at all. _OK._

He sits back, grinning.

“God, you’re disgusting, you disgust me,” Joris says.

He clears his schedule. On Tuesday, he scours his apartment from top to bottom. He intends to go out in the afternoon, to buy a bottle of wine (or three), a nice table runner. Maybe napkin rings and napkins; maybe Axel will expect him to have these things, now that he’s in his thirties. Theoretically established. Theoretically an adult. But at one o’clock he gets the call, from Lucas, practically screaming. “Hello,” Lucas shouts. “Am I speaking to the great wizard? The alchemist? To Monsieur Maxence Danet _Flamel_?”

“Holy fucking shit,” he says. He stares across his bedroom, at the shadows on the wall, the unmade bed, the sleepy, underwatered philodendron at the top of his bookshelf, a black and white Polaroid of his twenty-five-year-old self and Simon grinning out from behind its dry brown leaves, arm in arm: this is the day his life changes, the hour, the minute, the moment.

“That’s right,” Lucas yells, and Maxence pulls the phone away from his ear and lets his arm dangle, and Lucas exclaims into the still afternoon air from the region of his thigh—a dreary afternoon, heavy gray skies: _It’s you, you’ve got the part, I’ve got the papers, come sign them as soon as you can._

He texts Agathe. _!!!_

_!!! _she responds. _Is it a big one?_

_Huge_, he says. _It’s exactly the one you think it is. You can’t tell Pierre. You can’t tell anyone._

_Damn. I was just about to get the megaphone so Julie and I could shout it from the rooftops._

_Congratulations!!!!!!!_

He sets his phone down to water the philodendron. He smiles at Simon’s hair in the photograph, curling around his and Maxence’s heads like the leaves of a carrot. Then he pulls on a jacket and runs out the door, all the way to the métro, to the Seine and Lucas’ office on the bank. Lucas greets him enthusiastically with a set of loud bises. He offers Maxence the fountain pen from his breast pocket.

There’s a whole process first, a document review. They go through the contract page by page with Minou, the agency attorney. She’s very precise; she wants him to understand everything and repeat it back to her. Three films and five years of his life, per diems, merchandising rights. It’s nearly seven by the time they release him, and so he arrives at his apartment at almost the same time Axel does, both of them slightly damp beneath the soft evening drizzle, Maxence guarding his copy of the contract in a plastic bag, and Axel holding a bottle of wine.

“Hi,” Axel says, smiling.

Maxence wipes the rain from his forehead and chin. Quick, backhanded, cat-paw swipes. “Hi,” he says, breathless; he saw Axel turning the corner, all the way up the street, and jogged to catch him.

They trade bises, light, airy, scented with rainwater and whatever Axel’s wearing, bergamot and pepper. And beneath it the heat of Axel’s skin. Mouthwatering, Maxence thinks, fumbling with his keys. He imagines turning back, sinking his teeth into the plane of muscle between neck and shoulder, pressing the chilled tip of his nose into warm flesh. Axel’s smile lingered through their kisses, but it fades now into somber expectation. His gaze lifts, and Maxence wonders if he’s holding his breath.

His feet have lost the pavement. The contract slaps his thigh and digs a line into his wrist, and he can’t tell whether the bag is dragging him into the earth or pulling him into sky. A million euro contract hangs from his wrist and he wishes it were a script instead; he wishes it began, with Philippe Besson’s quiet and exact narration, _One day, I know precisely when…_ The whole world flashes blue and pink. Axel colors. Axel eyes and lips.

Not here, he tells himself. Not on Jean Jaurès, where an old woman is pushing her shopping and bedraggled students are smoking in a ring on the corner.

The fading light is in Axel’s eyelashes, gray-gold. Not now, Maxence revises, but in an hour, maybe: in an hour, yes.

In the foyer, he makes a show of checking his mailbox, humming, jingling his keys, clinging to a pretense of normalcy, and then he remembers Axel’s dangling bottle of wine and feels like an ass.

“I’m sorry,” he says, ushering Axel inside. “Nothing’s ready yet.” Their shoes are silent on the spiraling staircase: they glide up like phantoms, Maxence in his rubber-soled boots and Axel in his enormous white sneakers.

“Well, I’m early,” Axel offers graciously. “I suppose your friends are the kind to arrive fashionably late. Am I the first?”

“The what?” he says, blinking.

“The first guest.”

“The first—you’re the only one,” he says, and they stand in front of number 403 looking at each other in astonishment.

Axel says, “I thought…”

He doesn’t know what to say. He unlocks the door—the lock is finicky, it needs the right amount of pressure and a decisive twist—and steps in, and leaves it open, leaves it to Axel, whether to stay or go. His heart is in his throat; he swallows it down as he toes off his boots, slings the keys into their little dish, tosses the dewy contract onto the table. He saunters into the kitchen, as though it doesn’t matter to him, as though he isn’t straining for the plastic squeak on the landing that will signal Axel’s departure. After a moment, he hears the door shut, a creak, and finally the click of Axel turning the lock.

“Nice place,” Axel offers. He trails into the kitchen a little uncertainly, peering left and right like he expects company—J.F. lounging by the record player, models dangling wine glasses. There’s nothing but silence. Axel’s taken off his shoes. He sets his bottle of wine on the table by the contract and stands by the window looking young and small. The clouds are beginning to break, and the purple light of dusk dapples his cheek.

“It’s not very big,” Maxence says. He wishes J.F. were there, or even Mathilde, to take the stiffness out of Axel’s shoulders. “But we don’t need a lot of space.”

“We?”

“Brian and me,” he clarifies.

“Brian!” Axel exclaims. “Fuck. He must be enormous now.”

“Just under a meter,” he says. He shrugs. “He’s small for his age.”

Axel’s grin transmutes into a wry smile. “I know how that is,” he says. “Can I see him?”

“Not scared?” He glances at the counter, at the bag of tiger prawns thawing in the sink. “Sure. He’s in my room—go ahead. Take him out if you want. I’m going to start…”

“You’re cooking?”

He doesn’t quite flush, but his face prickles. This goes beyond bouquets, he thinks, and he shrugs again, as coolly as he can. “I don’t have napkin rings, though,” he says.

“What?” Axel says, laughing. He pushes open the door of Maxence’s bedroom and disappears inside. “Hello, Brian, do you remember me?”

He looks at the sudden white-knuckled clench of his hands on the countertop, the creamy well-scrubbed expanse of the backsplash sparkling under slices of pale evening light, his blue socks. In his bedroom, Axel is speaking to Brian the way he might to a dog. Maxence fights his smile before giving in to it. Then he reaches for the cabinet.

Dinner should have been shrimp curry, shells on. But it’s already 20:20, so Maxence improvises, rubbing each shrimp quickly with curry paste before dropping the whole mass into a hot pan. While it sizzles, he retrieves a plastic tub of day-old carrot salad from the depths of the refrigerator and spoons it into a bowl. He finds his bundle of asparagus, a little wilted, but passable. When she was still in _collège_, Agathe came home one day with a trick to revive drooping vegetables by setting them upright in a vase of ice water. He smiles at the memory of their celery bouquet, presented proudly to their mother. There’s no time for that now. He rubs and rinses each spear, snapping off the woody ends, and throws them into another pan with olive oil.

A long time ago, in someone else’s kitchen—Xavier’s, maybe—he and Axel pretended to share a joint and took some photos for Eliott’s Instagram. And Axel came tiptoeing up and put his arms around Maxence from behind, his cheek against Maxence’s shoulder. They didn’t make the final cut, those photos, but when Maxence closes his eyes, he can still see the outlines of their young bodies, thin, dim silhouettes in memory; he can still feel the press of Axel’s cheek through his t-shirt. Beardless, then, silky smooth to Axel’s chagrin—they laughed about it—but now there will be a rasp.

Quiet footsteps. Another creak. Maxence swallows.

“Wine,” he suggests, awarding himself a phantom César for the steadiness of his voice, the casual slouch of his spine. “Music?”

“What have you got?” Axel says, sounding strange, and Maxence twists to look at him, but Axel is already kneeling by the turntable, thumbing through LPs. No Brian. Abruptly, Axel snorts. “Fuck, Tchaikovsky? Where’s your EDM?”

“I put it away. My girlfriend wasn’t a fan.” Is he imagining it, the renewed stiffness of Axel’s shoulders? Is it happening right now, the mental retracing of steps—the reexamination of the shoes by the door, the quick survey of his room—whose shoes, whose photographs, whose curios on the bookshelf? A tentative re-tasting of the air, the way Brian tastes it, a little flicker to see whether there’s sweetness there, the smell of someone else’s perfume, someone else’s shampoo? As a matter of fact, there’s an empty bottle of Mathilde’s favorite eau de toilette sitting at the back of his medicine cabinet. He found it that morning while cleaning, sniffed it appreciatively, and put it back. “My ex-girlfriend, I mean,” he says.

“Recent development?”

“Not too recent,” he says. “We broke up last year. At the end of October.”

_The end of October._ He lets that sit between them. He knows Axel is thinking back. October, Seoul, that hotel, that room, that night.

“I broke up with her,” he says; he wants Axel to know it, this one important fact.

But Axel’s face is blank when he stands, conveying nothing but vague, polite sympathy. “Sorry to hear that,” he says. “I guess it’s easier sometimes in this line of work. Being single.”

He holds up J.J. Cale’s _Troubadour_. The sleeve is printed with blue skies and fluffy clouds in the shape of guitars. Axel eases the disc out, drops the needle. _Hey, baby_, the A-side starts, and Maxence turns away.

“So, what’s on the menu, chef?” Axel says. “Smells great. Can I help?”

The shrimp curry was Agathe’s suggestion; she made it for his birthday one June in Paris and left the recipe as a present, specifying the use of curry paste that came packaged in a small blue can. _Make it for Mathilde, she’ll love it. _He purchased the same brand of paste over the weekend, along with dark green cans of coconut milk, ducking in and out of a string of Asian groceries on the way back from Joris’ studio. His phone had felt like it was glowing in his pocket, warmed by Axel’s _OK_.

Now the back of his neck is warm, his ears buzzing—with embarrassment, with anxiety.

“Wine,” he says again, somewhere between a suggestion and a plea.

“Oh, right, of course,” Axel says. “Let me…”

He brushes Axel’s wrist when he hands over the corkscrew. Axel doesn’t react. Not even a tremor.

The wine is good. The glow returns. They drink half the bottle before Maxence plates their dinner, arranging everything a little more loosely than he had planned to, perhaps, dividing the curried shrimp into heaps atop piles of slightly overcooked asparagus. He pours himself another glass. Axel sits at the table, watching him, sipping, reminiscing. “Do you remember the photoshoot we had,” he says, “in Xavier’s kitchen?” _Do you remember when…and this…and that?_

“I should take a picture of this,” he says. “For Agathe. This is her recipe, you know. A Cubist interpretation of her recipe, anyway.”

“Why not?” Axel says brightly. He grins down at his plate, and Maxence looks with him, at the ring of red-tailed prawns, the fragment of asparagus caught in the silver tines of his fork. He looks closely, as though he will be able to see the imprint of Axel’s lips. “You’re a better cook than Eliott, that’s for sure.”

He waits for the wince and the stammer, the slow flush, but it never comes.

He says, “That’s a low bar. Even Eliott would have improved by now.”

“No,” Axel says. “I think Eliott burned down his kitchen and was jailed for arson. And then when he got out, he seduced his parole officer.”

“You’re mixing up my filmography.”

“Then he ran away and joined a medieval reenactment troupe.”

“Oh, come on.” He laughs and finishes the last of his shrimp. “Okay, and what’s Lucas been up to in the years since his _mec_ was sent to prison? A long vacation. A long silence. Working on his music, maybe.”

Axel’s grin fades. “It was my mother,” he says. “She was ill. She needed a surgery, chemo. So I took some time…”

He sets down his knife and fork. Starts to reach across the table. Stops. Pours the last of the wine into Axel’s glass.

“Axel—shit. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. She’s fine.” He pauses. “It was the night on the train, actually. You remember? In the café car. She called to tell me that her scan had come back clear. Against all odds. Fuck, Maxe, it was crazy. To get that news and then to look up, to see you…”

The empty wine bottle is hovering in space, trembling in his hand. He sets it down. “What do you mean?”

“It was like a second chance,” Axel says. He doesn’t notice the shivering bottle. His gaze is fixed on his own hands: the fingers laced tightly together, fingertips kneading the spaces between knuckles. “I regretted it so much,” he continues. “What I said to you at Christmas. Because I know why—of course I know why—you turned it down. The role of Thomas.”

He looks at Axel sharply. “You do?”

“Of course,” Axel repeats. He meets Maxence’s eyes with a stare of his own, wide and blue and open. “I know it was nothing personal. I’ve had to turn down similar roles. Once you’ve been typecast, it’s hard to break out. I know that. I knew that from the beginning. And there was a time limit, an expiration date, for us. It had to end. It had to. No one expected us to be Lucas and Eliott until we were doddering old men. No one.”

There’s something desperate in Axel’s eyes now, in the clutch of his fingers. It’s as though he’s waiting for Maxence to agree. To echo, _No one_, and make a joke.

Maxence wants to stand up; he wants to lie down; he wants to slam out of his own apartment and pound out into the night, and, as a parting cry, he wants to throw over his shoulder, _You’re wrong. You’ve got it all wrong. _

The voice of reason lambasts him, sounding a good deal like Joris. _For fuck’s sake, his mother’s had cancer. He wants a bit of normalcy. Restore it for him. _

His ribs ache. He says, light as air, “With David still directing in the front room of our shared nursing home.”

“Exactly,” Axel says, relieved. “Exactly.”

They come to the end of the asparagus. The carrot salad is returned, mostly uneaten, to its tub. Shrimp shells, shrimp heads and tails, are scraped into a plastic bag, which Maxence ties tight; he’ll throw it away outside to keep the smell out of his apartment, already so saturated with curry. Axel says goodbye to Brian; Axel sits to tie his shoes.

“Oof, that wine,” Axel says, bracing one hand against the wall as he sinks down. “It’s from Charlie’s uncle, from the Plamondon vineyard. It wasn’t bad, was it?”

“Not bad at all. Give him my compliments. Charlie too.”

From the ankles down, Maxence is anchored to the floor, in the narrow cave of his foyer in the last days of winter, but the rest of him is back in the New Year, floating in a quiet moment in Joris’ living room. In an hour, he’ll be on the rug in the bathroom, hugging his knees, telling Simon he’s ruined everything.

“Well,” Simon says, “why _did _you turn it down?”

They’re collapsed on the sofa, and Simon is upside-down with his feet in the air and his blond curls almost touching the ground. It's 4 a.m.: the sky is still dark; Joris and the others are still on the roof.

He thinks about lying, about tossing out some convenient, glib line about the quality of the script or his total detachment from the story, but the night has exhausted him, and his head is empty.

He says, “Eliott.”

“Ah, yes, Eliott,” Simon says. They’ve talked about Eliott every now and then, not so much as a character but as a friend, a distant relative, a cousin of Maxence’s who sometimes comes to stay. He’s here now, in this room, watching Simon with shadowed eyes. Simon can’t see him. Simon asks Maxence and the ceiling, “So?”

“I couldn’t do it,” Maxence says, joining Simon in his upside-down positioning. “I knew I couldn’t bear to be anyone but Eliott around him.”

“Fuck, how limiting is that!” Simon says. “Did you even go to see it?”

“See what? _Lie with Me_? No.”

“Your loss,” Simon says. “_I _saw it. It was great. Broke my fucking heart. It’s that thing Axel does, that thing with his eyes.”

In the present, Axel is getting to his feet, his fingertips light against the wall, his eyes downcast. “And congratulations,” he says, straightening. “If that contract on the table is what I think it is, you’ll be glad to be single. A project like that, it eats your entire life.”

He opens the door. “Thanks. You know from experience, I suppose.”

Axel snorts. “Well, not exactly, no, but it was hard for me, all that travel, all those plays. It’s nice to have your own home to come back to. To have your own space.” He winks. “To have your own music, for instance.”

It’s interesting, he thinks, the things people bring into your life and the things they take away. The spaces they alter. A forgotten corner of his medicine cabinet radiating rose and amber thanks to Mathilde’s eau de toilette, empty but still fragrant and stamped with curling golden letters: _Ce soir ou jamais_. His closet, empty of her dresses, her jumpsuits, her sweaters, her black underwear, stacked with EDM LPs and smelling of nothing. And now his kitchen, suffused with turmeric and coriander, with ginger and garlic and the bluesy notes of the B-side of J.J. Cale’s _Troubadour_, with the bottle of Plamondon cabernet, and empty, desolately empty, of Axel.

“I can always fall for my costar,” Maxence says, “if I get lonely.”

For an instant, Axel looks stunned. His brows lift, his mouth drops; a ring of white surrounds the deep blue of his irises.

Regret hits the back of Maxence’s throat, sour. He starts to say that he’s kidding, that he doubts they’ll have the time, or the inclination, or the chemistry, whoever she is, whoever she’ll be, but Axel’s face is already changing, smoothing out, stretching into a smile.

“Bam,” Axel says. “Problem solved.”

Maxence sees him out, follows him to the street to deposit his stinking bag of shrimp peels in a garbage can on Jean Jaurès. Axel’s parked his scooter around the corner. They trade jokes about the number of times it’s been stolen.

“Fuck,” Maxence says, “how’d you bring the wine?”

“Between my legs,” Axel says. He squeezes his knees together to demonstrate, utterly without guile, entirely innocent, just Axel being Axel. There’s movement at the intersection, a woman out in a leather jacket laughing into her smartphone. Maxence recalls the softness of the hour before dusk, the old woman with her grocery cart, the bustle of the street. He should have kissed Axel then, he thinks, right there on his doorstep, before the curry and wine had time to seep into their tongues, before Axel had declared the past erased, declared them friends again.

“You’re insane,” he says, after a moment, and Axel grins at him.

“Thanks for the invitation,” Axel says. He's strapping on his helmet, disappearing behind his visor. “I’m no cook, I’m even worse than Eliott, but let me pay you back sometime.”

“Dinner?” he says, dumbfounded. “At your place?”

“Or nearby. There’s that Moroccan restaurant. Le Tagine. Remember?”

He doesn’t, but he nods. “Sure.”

“I’ll invite Robin,” Axel says. “Paul and Léo, too, maybe. _SKAM_ reunion. Gang reunion. Boys’ night.”

“Sounds like fun.”

When he returns to his landing, dragging his feet, he remembers Axel’s umbrella. He hurries to his room and finds it lying on the floor where he left it, under the desk, practically wedged there. He looks around. Only an hour ago, Axel stood here: he stood and looked at the philodendron, at the air plants, at Brian, the bed, at all of Maxence’s things; maybe even touched them. There’s a line through the dust on the cover of _Lie with Me_. He traces the line, the path of Axel’s fingertip. It’s too late, of course, to chase after him.


	3. you didn't go far enough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little late, sorry. The world: troubled! Dialogue: difficult! Many thanks to and gentle elbowing of [FLWhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite), who in the midst of writing a whole-ass original novel (get excited!) read my piecemeal drafts, offered useful suggestions, and teased me about the ongoing emotional constipation of my characters, all of whom, like me, have an incredibly hard time Using Their Words.
> 
> Content warning: Harry Potter. Given that a portion of this chapter deals with my wishful-thinking, "wouldn't it be nice," fake Nicolas Flamel movie trilogy that absolutely, 100 percent contains nonbinary and genderfluid characters, I feel compelled to add here that trans people exist, trans lives matter, and JKR can fuck right off. As Daniel Radcliffe [said](https://www.thetrevorproject.org/2020/06/08/daniel-radcliffe-responds-to-j-k-rowlings-tweets-on-gender-identity/): _If these books taught you that love is the strongest force in the universe, capable of overcoming anything; if they taught you that strength is found in diversity, and that dogmatic ideas of pureness lead to the oppression of vulnerable groups; if you believe that a particular character is trans, nonbinary, or gender fluid, or that they are gay or bisexual; if you found anything in these stories that resonated with you and helped you at any time in your life — then that is between you and the book that you read, and it is sacred._

In keeping with the Harry Potter formula, he joins a trio. His two costars are both young women. Their chemistry is good, but familial; they tease one another and jostle elbows like siblings. It’s not immediately clear from the script which, if either, is meant to become Perenelle, the alchemist’s wife.

_His _wife, he reminds himself: _he_ is the alchemist, currently sitting at a long table in a T-shirt and slim-cut joggers, with his hair pulled into a pathetic tuft at the back of his skull and Dounia and Lynon on either side of him, their script booklets spread between them and open to page 43.

Dounia, a Moorish princess, is Leïla Benyamina, slender and elegant today in a white tank-top, leggings, and deep red cardigan. She’s twenty-eight, a former ballet dancer, the youngest of six children, all of whom are now involved in some way in the movie industry: a director, a sound engineer, a videographer, two screenwriters. “Yes,” Leïla had said, at their first meeting, with a wry smile, “we’re a whole film crew unto ourselves.” She’s been in seven films, two by her eldest brother the director, none of which, Maxence is ashamed to admit, he’s seen.

Lynon, a country nobody who sneaks into Beauxbatons, the wizarding school, is a newbie. Her work name is Alison Alibert, but her real name is Alison Alibert-Ardisson, hyphenated. Her parents met in _sixième_, where for lack of seats they were placed at the same table, along with children named Allemand and Ardouin, though for six years afterward her mother was chasing a boy at the next table over, surname Bousquet; how much better that sounds, Alibert-Bousquet. “Oh yes,” she’d said, seconds after they were introduced, “and to make it worse, guess where I live now?”

Avignon. “You’re joking,” he’d said. “You could be a tongue-twister.”

“I could be a tongue-twister,” she’d agreed. She’s short and fair and somewhat medieval in appearance, with her round, wide, glistening forehead and belladonna eyes. “They couldn’t get Lily-Rose Depp,” she’d said, pointing at her forehead with a grin, “so here’s the next best thing.” She’s only twenty-two, an only child and a distant relative of the famous TV producer, who may or may not have come to her christening.

“And where were you before Avignon?” he’d asked.

“Carpentras,” she’d said. “You know, Truffle-town.” And she’d mimed the shape of a truffle by bringing her thumbs and index fingers together in a gentle circle.

“I have a friend who’d love to meet you,” he said.

That friend has taken a detour into the music business on his way back to the Avignon theater circuit. In April, Axel releases a single, _Acceleration_. It’s a six-minute drum solo that, true to its name, gets faster and faster, until you can almost hear the droplets of sweat flying off Axel’s forehead and forearms. The album follows on the third of May, titled, very humbly, _Auriant_. (_It wasn’t my idea, I swear,_ Axel says, after Maxence ribs him via text.) There are four other tracks, including a second drum solo and a short instrumental interlude on piano that riffs on Clair de Lune. Maxence discovers and plays the album in Simon and Natalia’s apartment on a sunny day, listening hard to the sporadic lyrics for any little clue and replaying each track until Simon groans and threatens to confiscate his phone.

There’s a celestial theme, he thinks, and a maternal one. The sixth and final track is called _Les noms d’astres_, and it’s more or less a spoken word poem in the style of Ben Mazué’s _33 ans_, delivered by Axel and an unknown woman who speaks in a soft, cigarette-husked voice. A mother and son discussing the stars.

_Is that your mother?_

_No, she was too shy. It was Victoire, actually._

Charlie’s mother. _I see._

Before the first readings began, there were costume fittings, wig fittings. Now there’s a personal trainer who works him to death and a stunt coordinator who teaches him how to duck and roll and fight with a staff. He’s incredibly sore that night, from the six million rows Pascal put him through the day before. And what’s the point of it all? he’d gasped, while Pascal laughed at him. He’ll be wearing robes the entire film. (“You mean no one’s told you about the fountain scene?” Pascal had said, winking. “Come on, up. Another set.”) He settles into bed with a groan and, perhaps rudely, doesn’t ask about Charlie.

Filming begins at the studios in Aubervilliers. He texts Axel whenever he gets the chance, in the mornings, in the makeup chair, in the back seat of the car as he and Leïla are shuttled back into Paris. By bedtime, there’s usually a reply, polite, straightforward, and sometimes bemused, as though Axel can’t believe they’re still speaking. The conversation feels stilted and slow, fed by responses spread twelve hours apart.

_When do you go to Avignon?_

_The 24th of June. _And thirty minutes later: _Robin and Paul too._

_Are you in a play together? Oh, is it The Three Stooges? _

_Very funny._

He forgets to respond until the next day, and he opens up their chat to see that Axel has offered to save a seat for him. Reluctantly, he has to turn Axel down. _We’re filming until the end of July._

_And after that? _Axel says. _Do you have other plans? Come see me._

He sits up, giddy. “Fuck,” he says. He reads it again: _Come see me._ “Fuck. Oh, fuck.”

_You’re staying in Avignon? _

_For a little while. _

_Sure, then, sure, absolutely. _He swallows. _I can’t wait._

Half a second later, at precisely 23:00, Axel says goodnight. He wonders if Axel has been watching the clock. Actually, he wonders what Axel is doing—whether he’s in his own apartment, and if so, on the couch or in bed, clothed or nude? Drumming his fingers, in all scenarios. Maybe tapping his foot. Acceleration. _I am the one watching the clock_, he thinks. The clock, the calendar. It’s the twentieth of May and he’s already counting down the days. July, then. July.

_Not going to stargaze?_

_Fuck,_ Axel says. _I don’t know who teases me more about that track, my mother, Léo, Victoire…now you._

_It’s my favorite track. _

Axel disappears, leaving the message on “read,” but in the morning there’s a _Thank you, mine too _waiting for him.

He’s listening to D’astres one night in June, sitting alone by the embers of a dying fire. The tree cover is so thick here that all he can see, looking up, is darkness—a single, downy cotton strip of cloud, the faintest starlight limning the outlines of the leaves, which form their own constellations. They’re on their third week of filming in Ariège, a medieval town in the foothills of the Pyrenees that will become Beauxbatons in its infancy. They traveled there in a convoy of buses and vans and one crew member’s flashy black Jeep. Half of the main unit, Leïla included, have hiked back into Ariège to sleep in the rickety old inn near the town square, romantic in its own right with its original thirteenth-century beams and rafters.

Alison—going by ‘Lynon’ full-time now—and the other half have stayed behind along with the second unit and the director, Alfonso Cuarón, returning from the cusp of retirement to take another stab at the Potterverse. They’ve chopped Lynon’s hair into a page-boy cut with thick blonde bangs. It glows around her head like a halo as she squats down beside him on a log, smelling of smoke and citronella.

“What’s that you’re listening to?”

He offers her an earbud.

“Oh,” she says, after the track ends. She wrinkles her nose. “Um…interesting.”

“That’s my friend,” he says. “The truffle-obsessed one. Axel Auriant.”

“Oh yes, Axel,” Lynon says. She was too young for SKAM. And too straight too, maybe, to seek it out later. He doesn’t mind telling her about Axel because she, unlike Leïla—and Joris and Simon and all the rest—doesn’t get that look on her face, half-knowing, half-pitying. _Oh yes, Axel, your so-called friend, to whom you refer fifteen times a day. _“He and I should form a band. We could call ourselves the Quintuple As or something. We can sing about truffles.”

“I’ll suggest it to him.”

She says goodnight. He returns the bud to his ear and starts D’astres again. He wishes there were a way for him to edit the track without embarrassment, to chop it the way they chopped Lynon’s bangs and sever Axel’s voice from Victoire’s, either in a single sweep or with one hundred careful snips. He imagines closing his eyes to the red flicker of the embers and just listening—_Auriga, Andromeda, Ares, Calum, Cancer, Cancer, Cancer. _

He imagines: _Maxence, Maxence, Maxence._

The weeks pass in a blur of greenery and gold dust. Then the production moves to the Vermillion Coast and his eyes are dazzled by water the color of blue tourmaline and sand as white as the undersides of Lynon’s wrists. He isn’t allowed on the beach without an umbrella and a liter of sunblock, and he has a nightmare about Alfonso obsessively counting the moles and freckles on his body: _301_, Alfonso finishes, in the dream, _Mother of God_.

Leïla and Lynon finish their Mediterranean scenes in mid-June and return to their homes in Paris and Avignon, respectively. Lynon texts from Avignon, Simon and Joris from Paris. Leïla doesn’t, and Axel, too, goes silent. After all, the Avignon Theater Festival is in full swing.

_Stages everywhere,_ Lynon confirms. _Stages left and right. Stages when you look up, stages when you look down. Stages and actors. You trip over them._

_Are you performing?_

_I wish! It would spare me from having to attend. My roommates are fanatics. In fact, it’s time to go._

_What are you seeing tonight? _he asks, but she’s already vanished.

“Of course,” Alfonso says, when Maxence asks if he can go into town, looking at him a little strangely. Then he winks. “The sun has set, hasn’t it?”

So Maxence follows some of the crew away from the beach, into Cadaqués. On a terrace below strings of lights and white-washed walls he meets Melina, a school administrator from Barcelona who, it turns out, accompanied her teenaged sister to a casting call for extras. She’s dark-haired and petite, with enormous brown eyes and a loud laugh. The eyes draw him in from across the crowd, but it’s the laugh that prompts him to approach her. She laughs a lot as she drinks, her hand on his forearm, her fingers stroking his knuckles; she laughs as she invites him to her hotel room and laughs again, shrugging, when he turns her down. By the time they return to Ariège for a scene along the ramparts of the Château de Foix, he’s forgotten what she looks like.

He spends another few days scrambling around the forest, on the run from magical beasts that will be added in post. They rest on the 14th of July, then film all the way until 23:59 on July 30, when Alfonso yells cut and everyone gathers around a six-tiered, mostly melted, pink-frosted cake to celebrate Harry Potter’s birthday.

“Bonnes vacances,” Alfonso says, to cheers. Eight hours later, Maxence is rocketing across the scorched yellow countryside toward Avignon, where he’ll make Axel make good on his promise to take him to dinner.

When he arrives in Avignon, he’s puzzled to see the streets quite free of obstruction—no stages, no crowds.

_The festival? It ended on Sunday,_ Lynon answers. _Wait! Are you here?_

He looks around, dazed. The train into Toulouse had been relatively empty, a few people in suits, a few vacationing families, but from Nimes to Avignon Centre, it had been deserted. The woman staffing the café car had offered him a plastic-wrapped madeleine to go with his espresso. “On the house,” she’d said, winking at him. “There’s no one else to eat them but me, after all.” He’d thought it was just the hour.

Now, a mother and child walk hand in hand down the platform. He looks back at his phone. It’s just past 14:45. _How do I get to Le Cabestan?_

_Where are you? Centre? Just walk north. Take Jean Jaurès. Are you seriously here? Call me!_

He calls Axel instead, gets his voicemail. He walks north, slowly, gripping the shoulder strap of his bag. Obeying Alfonso, he’s wearing long sleeves, long pants, a hat that looks like a cross between an overturned bucket and a wilted flower. The sun is merciless; sweat pools along the band of his hat and drips down his neck and temples. He stops outside a café-bar on the corner and tries Axel again. _Hello, you’ve reached the voicemail of…_

“Axel, fuck,” he mutters. He hangs up, shuffles into the café-bar, orders a lemonade. It comes quickly, and he gulps it down, staring at the black mass of his bag in the chair opposite. It was a brilliantly sunny day like this the last time he was in Avignon, he thinks, but muggy; the sweat had soaked the back of his shirt as he sat at a bar on the corner sipping at his beer, waiting and waiting. The lemon rises, pure acid, in his throat.

_I’m coming now,_ he tells Axel, _I’m just on the corner of Jaurès and Fabre._

On Jaurès no one gives him a second glance: SKAM is long forgotten, Seven Little Crosses garnered little attention; in the shadow of his hat, his face is unrecognizable. And it’s blazing hot; the weight of the air pushes all their gazes to the ground. _Fuck_, he repeats to himself, _fuck_. He obeys the melodious instructions of his phone and winds through the narrow gap between two buildings, more of an alley than a lane. He passes a faded blue mural and a pair of tourists, conspicuous in their khakis and T-shirts. Then, on the corner, the elegant black and white sign: _Le Cabestan._

The glass door beside the sign opens, and there’s Axel—stepping out backward to direct a merry farewell at whoever remains inside.

No one’s been following Axel around with sun cream and parasols—this summer, in Avignon, he’s turned into gold. His hair is gold, his arms are gold, the hairs on his arms are gold, and his voice as he calls _See you later_, that’s gold too. The moment he turns, Maxence is sure, there will be flecks of gold in his eyes.

Later, replaying the encounter in his mind, Maxence will wonder if Axel had seen him already, through the glass door, a lone, dark, straggling figure creeping up the lane—had seen him and turned his back on purpose, to compose himself, to take a breath and square his shoulders.

Finally, he does turn, casually, naturally. He scans the distance, he squints, he lets his mouth drop. He waves, shouts Maxence’s name. His eyes are very blue.

Maxence hurries toward him. They _bise_. Axel smells cool and neutral: hotel soap. They separate, and he watches the bob of Axel’s throat as he swallows.

“Fuck,” Axel says. “Look at you.”

“What?” He smiles.

Axel reaches out and gives his left bicep a friendly squeeze. “I remember how baggy this shirt used to be. What do you bench now, two hundred kilos? Three?”

“Ha ha,” he says. “Barely ninety.”

“You look great.”

“And you,” he says. Axel’s hand is still on his arm; the five points of contact of his fingers are like five points of fire. Blue eyes, gold lashes. He leans in.

_Wait_. Axel says it so softly that it drifts between them like a shared thought.

The apology is ready on his lips. But he shuts up as Axel tugs him forward. They go toward the glass door, Axel leading him like a jittery tango partner. Through the door, into the Cabestan and past the box office, where an older woman with gray hair and enormous red earrings is leafing through a magazine—

“Back so soon? Did you forget something?”

“Yes, sorry. Oh, this is Maxence.”

“Hi.”

“Hello! I’m Caroline. Nice to meet you.”

They’re flying by. He calls over his shoulder, “And you too—”

—past the auditorium, down a flight of metal stairs, his bag bouncing on his shoulder, Axel bouncing in front of him, his hand now sweating around Maxence’s elbow, a sharp left to the red door with a temporary placard that reads _Auriant_. Axel bangs it open and pushes him through.

The room is dark and quiet until Axel hits a switch. The ominous silhouette in the corner reveals itself to be a cardboard cutout of Buster Keaton. There’s a bottle of chilled mineral water on the dressing table and, beside it, a vase bursting with white roses, ringed by the lights of the vanity and doubled in the mirror.

He imagines Axel picking out the bouquet, scrutinizing one bundle after another in the flower shop, hemming, hesitating, carrying them into the Cabestan, doing his best to shield them from the withering force of the sun, arranging them carefully. Looking at them, trying not to look at them, checking his watch, awaiting Maxence’s arrival, and at last—_I’m coming now, I’m just on the corner_—leaving them to rush upstairs.

He turns to Axel, practically twirling, grinning.

Without breaking eye contact, Axel reaches behind himself: he pulls the door shut; he locks it.

Maxence drops his bag. Axel pushes the hat off his head as he winds his fingers into his hair. He’s already panting, his fingers gripping tight, pulling Maxence’s mouth toward him with wiry strength.

“Lemonade,” Axel murmurs.

He’s so happy he feels delirious, sunstruck. The cold metal edge of Axel’s watch brushes his cheek as Axel caresses him and kisses him again and again. Axel’s mouth is soft and open, his tongue hot; he tastes like himself and spearmint and Maxence’s lemonade.

_I missed this, _Maxence thinks, _I missed you._

He’s getting hard, his blood is pounding, and he pulls away, bends a bit at the waist, to keep himself from rubbing against Axel’s hip like a dog.

“Axel?” The door is jiggling, has been jiggling, for God knows how long. They spring apart guiltily. “Axel? Is that you? Elisa is here, she needs…”

“Oh, of course, yes,” Axel says loudly, straightening, and in the same fluid movement he runs his hands through his hair, adjusts his shirt, twists the lock, opens the door.

Maxence dives at his bag and slings it over his shoulder, over his groin. He straightens up too, awkwardly, in time to receive Caroline’s bewildered smile and the irritated look of the woman standing behind her, young, brunette, frowning.

“Did you find it?” Caroline asks. “Whatever it was that you…”

“Ah, yes,” Axel says. He taps his pocket. “My phone.”

“Oh, mustn’t leave that behind,” Caroline says.

“All yours,” Axel tells Elisa. “Break a leg.”

She grimaces. Maxence follows Axel out into the corridor. Elisa enters the dressing room, the door slams, and Caroline replaces _Auriant_ with _Denecourt._

“It’s opening night,” Caroline says apologetically. Then she shrugs her shoulders. “Ah, well! Come, let’s leave her to it.” She looks at Maxence. Her mouth forms the shape of an _M_, hesitates, goes slack; she’s forgotten his name. “Ah,” she says abruptly, “I know, you’re not a musician, are you?”

“He’s a movie star, Caro,” Axel says. He’s smiling. The last vestiges of a bright pink flush are fading from his cheeks, his throat. “Want an autograph?”

“Oh, yes?” Caroline says.

He listens, incredulous, as Axel rattles off his filmography in near-chronological order, with the same poise, pitch, and projection he might use on stage. His voice booms down the corridor. Caroline nods along, growing more and more enthused. “And the big project, the top secret one,” Axel says, boisterously, nudging him, “am I allowed to mention it yet?”

He hasn’t said a word in fifteen minutes. He says, thin and creaky, “No.”

The door opens, just a sliver. Elisa peers out with a sheepish smile. “Caro,” she says, “they’re so beautiful, the flowers. Thank you.”

Caroline decides to usher them out. (“I can’t stand it down there, now that everyone’s gone, now that you’re going: it’s so lonely!”) While she kisses Axel goodbye, Maxence fiddles with the strap of his bag and examines the wall of posters. He sees Axel raising an eyebrow as he perches on a chair, wearing a multi-colored striped sweater and white jeans with holes in the knees. Elisa is there, too, on a separate print, raising clay-covered hands to the camera and looking somber in a wrinkled blue smock: _ELISA DENECOURT is CAMILLE CLAUDEL—A Woman, 31 July to 29 September 2026_.

He hears the click as the box office door shuts. Axel bobs up beside him, clears his throat. “I don’t know what she’s planning to do in there,” Axel mutters, “for the next five hours.”

“Caro?”

“Elisa.”

He waves his hand, banishing Elisa and his disappointment about the roses. He thinks about the green room, the orchestra pit, the catwalk, a velvet-furred seat in the mezzanine—the lane behind the theater, in the shadow of a dozen shutters and window boxes—anywhere, any place, it doesn’t matter. All he wants is Axel’s mouth, Axel’s tongue, Axel’s hands in his hair.

“Where are you staying?” he says. Still thin, still creaky.

“What?”

“Where are you—”

Axel is looking at him, pink again in the cheeks. “Le Magnan,” he says, “with Robin.”

“And is he there right now?”

“He is there right now, yes.” Axel looks away. “And you, where are _you_ staying?”

“With you.”

“Fuck,” Axel says quietly. His face is blazing now. “That’s a little presumptuous, isn’t it?”

“May I stay with you?”

Axel swallows. He’s boring a hole in Elisa’s poster with his eyes. “If you need a place to sleep, sure. I didn’t realize you—”

“Just sleep?” He touches Axel’s wrist. He lowers his voice. “_Axel_.” 

Axel twitches away. “Listen,” he says. “About. I didn’t mean to, ah. I just—I just. Listen, I’m sorry, I went too far.”

He inhales. “You didn’t go far enough.”

Axel finds his phone and jabs at it. “You must be hungry,” he says. “Robin’s free, he’s hungry too, I’m sure Il Capo will seat us.”

“Fuck Robin, I don’t give a shit about Robin,” he says. Axel stiffens. Maxence breathes out. “Sorry,” he says. He tries to speak softly. “Sorry. But I’m not hungry. I’m not hungry. Axel, look at me. Axel, please.”

Axel does look—quick, frightened; then his gaze slides over Maxence’s shoulder, toward the box office, toward Caroline and her fucking magazine.

“Let’s go outside,” he says.

“I don’t care if she sees. I don’t care if she hears.”

“I do,” Axel says, “okay?”

The roses, the roses. Thorns in his throat. “Why? Because of Charlie?”

“Charlie, what—” Axel stares at him. “Think of your career.”

“No one knows who I am.”

“They will soon.” Axel pushes the door open and hurls himself into the sunshine.

“Your hat.” Axel’s voice comes suddenly in the white-hot daze of light. “I’ll get it.”

Maxence stalls him with a sharp gesture. “Leave it,” he says, “forget it.”

Axel starts back anyway. At that moment, he hears his name: _Maxence, Maxence, Maxence! _Lynon arrives at the Cabestan in a flurry of blonde hair; beaming, shouting, she leaps at him and takes his arm.


	4. when you know, you know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I legit worked on this chapter until I was feverish, lol. Came back to fix a few things after a good night's sleep and some acetaminophen! But the imagery and Maxence's thoughts may be more chaotic than usual for that reason. 
> 
> Honestly, I might be dragging things out because I don't want this to end. But it has to...
> 
> I should have titled this fic "A Series of Unfortunate Dinners."

At Lynon’s suggestion, they cross the Rhône over the Edouard Daladier bridge, toward a juice bar that floats on the water. On their right, Maxence sees the truncated ruin of the famous Pont d’Avignon, straining toward the far shore. No one appears to be dancing on or below it. Lynon, skipping beside him, talks to Axel about Paris, about his recording studio, which turns out to have been in Aubervilliers all along.

Lynon exclaims. “To think you were next door the whole time we were filming!”

_Next door the whole time,_ Maxence thinks, _to think, to think_, and replying to his text messages on a twelve-hour delay.

“Aubervilliers, not Boulogne?” he says. “Did you give up on your dream of 92 square meters?”

Axel’s snorted laugh sounds genuinely surprised. “You still remember that?” he says, without turning around; he’s looking at the Avignon Bridge too, and as he looks, his smile fades. “Yes, Aubervilliers, and it’s the size of a shoebox.”

“Are you working on another album?”

“I don’t know,” Axel says. “Maybe another single, if inspiration strikes.”

“Maxe says you like truffles,” Lynon says. “I said we should sing about them. I’m from Carpentras, you know.”

Axel doesn’t understand. He glances at her, and Maxence thinks he can see the scroll of his thoughts: _Maxe? Carpentras?_

We had inside jokes like this once upon a time, Maxence thinks. There were days on set when all I had to do was catch your eye, and we'd be giggling for hours; I'd laugh until I was almost crying and David would be bemused, then stern. _Come, my children_, he'd say, _there's much to do. I'll get angry, I swear I'll get angry._

“There’s a truffle market there,” Lynon explains. “Every Friday.”

“It’s more than _like_,” Maxence says. “He’s obsessed with them.”

“Sure,” Axel says. “I suppose.”

He’s glad Lynon is there, chattering away, bouncing up and down along the cobbles with her seemingly boundless energy, her blonde bangs frizzed in the heat and bouncing with her. Axel should be bouncing too, he thinks, but he’s subdued: speaking slowly, moving tentatively, as though with every step he expects the ground to crumble away beneath his feet. The back of his neck is red—with heat, maybe, or with embarrassment, burning under the sun and the leaden weight of Maxence’s gaze.

The juice bar-boat, tethered on the Rhône, is a favorite of one of Lynon’s roommates, whose name is lost in the wake of a river cruise passing by. Axel orders a lemonade, then flushes. “An orange juice, actually, please,” he says quickly.

“Carrot-apple-ginger?” the woman behind the counter says. “Or turmeric-celery-ginger-pineapple?”

“One of each,” Maxence says, when Axel flounders. “My treat,” he adds.

“Oh, no, but…”

He waves Axel off. “Lynon?”

Lynon selects an echinacea fizz with pink salt. They find a trio of seats on the starboard side and try one another’s drinks. He brushes Axel’s fingers when they exchange their jars, and he slots his mouth exactly where Axel’s was before, looking up over the rim as he licks it, with studied carelessness, running his tongue along the thread.

Axel seems to flinch. He looks between Lynon and the river. He makes conversation vigorously enough, waves his drink around, and his gaze slides across Maxence’s chest, like Maxence is a shadow on the bank or the ghost in a darkened corner that he’s studiously trying to ignore.

They return to the mainland over the same bridge, spiraling closer and closer to the Palais des Papes through a series of narrow cobbled streets. Theater posters have been plastered on the walls, announcing old performances of Dom Juan. On the Street of the Golden Scissors, there’s an ancient portrait of Axel, no bigger than the palm of Maxence’s hand. It’s a few seasons old, and the details of his face are blurred and lost, but Maxence sees the shock of hair, the lab coat.

Lynon scampers toward a man juggling beneath an alcove, dressed like a medieval fool and ringed by tourists. Maxence seizes his chance; he reaches out and touches Axel’s elbow.

“Look,” he says.

“What?” Axel says, frowning. He doesn’t recognize himself.

“From that encore performance of _Vies des Urgences_, no?”

“If you say so.”

“Remember that summer I came to see you?” he says. “Your face was all over the city.” He glances up the street: Lynon’s halo of blonde hair is just visible beyond the jester’s hat. Back to Axel now, to his deep blue stare and the slice of shadow cutting his face in two. He traces the line with the knuckle of his third finger, following the edge of light and shadow until it reaches the seam of Axel’s lips.

Axel twists away. “Stop.”

“Axel—”

“_Stop_, fuck. I told Robin—”

“There’s time.”

“Plenty of time.” Lynon is back, smiling; Axel pivots toward her with an expression of bland interest, his shoulders relaxing: _Nothing to see here_. She stands in a sunny patch in the street, shielding her eyes with both hands. Maxence does the same, to keep his hands from curling into fists. “Shall we go to the palace? You’ve never seen it, right, Maxe?”

Axel’s mask slips. Irritation creases his face. “He has,” he says, clipped. “We went together.” Then, more graciously, “But it’s been years since then. Perhaps things have changed. But we have a dinner reservation. In Villeneuve.”

“Oh!” Lynon says. “When? Soon? You’d better take a car.”

“Axel wants to eat early,” Maxence says, “so he can be in bed by sundown. He’s ninety-five years old.”

“Ninety-five?” Lynon giggles. “He looks very spry for his age. And what does that make you?”

“One hundred, I think. Yes, one hundred.”

“Well, you’ve drunk the Elixir of Life, after all.”

“I have to pack tonight,” Axel interrupts, acknowledging the jibe with a smile that looks more like a grimace. “I’m taking an early train.”

“You’re leaving?” His heart echoes Lynon’s little mew of dismay. He can’t shake the suspicion that this plan has barely been fixed, that it’s retaliation for the sweaty slide of his knuckle on Axel’s cheek less than five minutes ago, and that Axel has yet to purchase his ticket.

Axel speaks quickly, without looking at him. “It’s over. I mean the festival. It’s done. You saw Caro, my name’s gone, it’s all Elisa’s show now, and my mother is waiting in Paris. My mother and Charlie.”

“What about…” The sunlight feels molten. His thoughts burn. What about me, he thinks, what about what just happened between us in that dressing room, what about your arms around me, your legs around me, the flush on your face, our two beating hearts?

“Robin has the room through Monday, if you…”

“So that’s it,” he says. “I came all the way here just to have dinner with you.”

“And to see Lynon, no? Don’t be rude.”

“It’s okay,” Lynon says cheerfully. “I’m resigned to my fate of being second best. We all know Maxe’s heart belongs to someone else.”

“What?” Axel says, startled. “His—what?”

“Oh,” Lynon says, wide-eyed, “fuck, sorry. Sorry, spoilers.”

On the edge of Daladier, with the sun glittering on the warm blue of the river and a bus pulling noisily away from the curb, he slings his arm around Lynon’s bare shoulder and says, “Why don’t you have dinner with us? Have dinner with us. Even though it’s early.”

“I won’t be intruding?”

“It would make me happy,” he says. “And you can tell us what you’ll show me tomorrow. What Axel will be missing. Robin won’t mind, will he, Axel?”

Axel’s voice is cool and even. “Robin would be delighted.”

Robin _is_ delighted. They find him lounging beneath an umbrella outside Il Capo, guarding a pitcher of beer. He does a dramatic double-take. Then: “Eliott!” he yells, scattering pigeons. He hurls himself at Maxence, kisses him four times, thumps his back. “Fuck, how long has it been? Too long, too long.”

“Hi, Arthur,” Maxence replies, and Robin peers around his shoulder and introduces himself to Lynon.

“It’s confusing, I know,” Robin says. “Six years, but he’s still here, Arthur, like a second skin.”

He’s right, Maxence thinks. Robin’s cut his hair and grown a short blondish beard, but the core of him is still there, Arthur Broussard all grown up, and his grin is Robin through and through, big and toothy, and pink-cheeked, too, with a bit of moisture gleaming at the corners of his mouth: he’s been drinking.

“I understand completely,” Lynon says. “Every day I tell myself that I’ll have to change my name for real. My own mother, when she calls me Alison, I think, _Who_?”

“Bah, well,” Robin says. “That’s just what it means to be a pro and to inhabit your character. I’m sure you’re not as bad as these two were. You’ve been with them all afternoon? Fuck! And you’re not sick of them?”

Il Capo hasn’t opened yet, he adds. They’re still firing up the oven. “Another thirty minutes, I’m afraid. Here’s some beer to tide us over. I got started without you, as you can see.”

They take their seats: Lynon on his right, Axel beside Robin.

“Shall I get another glass?” Robin asks, bobbing up again. “Or wine for Monseigneur here? And an ashtray, of course. One moment.”

“You smoke?”

Robin blinks. “Me? No. I thought you…”

“I quit.”

“Fuck me,” Robin says, sitting back down. “It’s a miracle. I remember how much Axel used to complain about the taste.” He winks at Lynon. “So you’re having a much nicer time of it, I guess.”

Axel’s grin looks automatic. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “Robin, come on.”

“Oh, not at all,” Lynon says. She lowers her voice and leans in, conspiratorial. “It’s a secret, it’s a spoiler, you absolutely can’t tell anyone, but we don’t kiss at all. It’s my sister he ends up interested in.”

“No!” Robin says, mock-anguished. “Your sister! Oh, the bastard.”

“More’s the pity,” he interjects gallantly.

He glances at Axel and notices the clench of his jaw and the frantic dart of his eyes, between Robin and the pitcher and the tinted windows of Il Capo. Axel starts to speak, but Robin drowns him out.

“So I don’t have a big romantic scene to look forward to, that’s what you’re saying,” Robin says, making a face. “What am I going to tell Paul? Maxence, tell your director he’s letting you go to waste.”

“Oh, no, there’s a kiss,” Lynon volunteers. “He kisses Leïla. Well, she kisses him. Ah, I’m jealous. I’m jealous just thinking about it.”

Axel says, almost croaking, “Leïla Benyamina?”

“Yes!” Lynon exclaims. “You know her? She’s _so_ talented.”

It’s no surprise that Axel would know Leïla, would move in the same serious, artistic orbit. He looks at Axel’s face, white beneath its tan, and wonders what Axel is imagining: himself and Leïla intertwined, with cameras overhead to capture every last sigh and gasp, or Leïla folding herself into his embrace in a sun-dappled clearing, tucking her head on his shoulder. She’s much taller than you, he wants to tell Axel. She’s taller than me, even, so erase whatever you’re thinking from your mind. It was so anodyne, so chaste; I never so much as brushed her ear with my thumb.

“Oh, I understand,” Robin says. “I understand totally. Back in the day we all wanted to kiss Maxence all the time. Isn’t that right, Axel? I remember you sneaking in some extras between takes. Despite the nicotine.”

“Method acting,” Axel says. “Look, why don’t we…”

“Charlie thought it was so funny,” Robin says. He nudges Maxence. “Charlie, you remember Charlie? Axel’s ex.”

“Yes,” he says, through the sudden ringing in his ears, “I remember Charlie.”

Axel is staring glassily at Il Capo, where a waiter is placing candles on the tables. “I’m sure they’ll let us in,” he whispers. He stands abruptly and strides toward the door.

“He really wants that pizza today,” Robin says, watching Axel speak to the maître d’. “Yeah, Charlie. Did you know she’s engaged? To some music producer. I think Axel introduced them. It happened recently, the engagement; they came to the festival on opening night and told us the big news. It was sudden, I gather,” he says, "but when you know, you know," and he smiles and nods as Axel waves them over.

He won’t remember much about dinner later—pizza, of course, shaved truffle, of course—potent wine, the gothic gleam of candlelight in Robin and Lynon’s matching brown eyes—raucous, nervous laughter, Robin’s barbed sarcasm, their jolly waiter—the nervous jiggling of Axel’s leg under the table, thumping hard enough to rattle the silverware, to rattle the earth, or so he thought: no one remarks upon it. At some point between the salad and the second bottle he stands and excuses himself.

The edges of the bathroom will be hazy in his memory, with darkness creeping in; the sink basin is a golden bowl. There is enough room to piss and wash his hands and turn in a slow circle. He crams himself into a corner and thinks about texting Axel. _Come. I’m waiting. _He thinks about Axel answering the summons, about Axel melting into his arms—_I’m here, I’m sorry about earlier, it was the heat, it was Elisa, Caro, Lynon, Leïla, forget them, kiss me_—the ridiculous proceeding that will follow, awkward and cramped, while they bite their knuckles or each other to muffle their voices. Outside, a crowd will gather, murmuring, knocking, and Axel won’t hear them; Axel won’t care.

The doorknob wobbles. He imagines pulling the door open, grandly, to receive his visitor. _Welcome, welcome. _An exchange of bows. _It’s not a dressing room, but we’ll make do. _

When at last he emerges, sheepish, patting his hands dry, he finds an old man waiting with folded arms.

At the table, they don’t seem to have missed him: Lynon and Robin are laughing over some anecdote; Axel is reaching for another slice.

After dinner, they stroll through Le Petit Jardin, past the ruins and the statue of Agricol Perdiguier. He says goodnight to Axel and Robin under the lights of the Palace Theater (“Message me when you’re back in Paris,” Robin says, “don’t let it be another six years before we see each other again, okay, Eliott?”) and chases Lynon onto the number 122 bus, bag flapping. He doesn’t look back.

“I guess I crashed the reunion,” Lynon says, as they trundle across the river.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“He’s really nice, Axel,” Lynon says. “How was it, working with him?”

“Fine,” he says, and then, relenting, “Fun. The best. The best days of my life, actually.”

“I won’t tell Alfonso.”

“Thanks.”

They disembark somewhere along the rim of Centre Ville. A breath of cool air sighs out of the bus with them before dissipating. The sun is long gone, but the shimmer of heat remains, trapped in the air, in the pavement.

“It’s still on YouTube, you know, SKAM,” Lynon says. “I watched it after I was cast.”

He nearly stumbles. “You never said.”

“I watched all seven of Leïla’s movies, too,” Lynon says. “I didn’t tell her that either. Don’t you think it was too creepy of me? Anyway, you were amazing. You and Axel. It was like I was watching you fall in love for real.”

He wants to tell her that he fell in love before they even started filming, on that first day, that first reading, where he limped in with his foot in a foam cast and looked at him, Axel, and knew that Axel was looking at him too, dumbstruck. That he’s never felt that way about anyone else before or since, that David snapped a picture just then like a fucking nature photographer, a storm chaser, that every time they meet Axel’s gaze flashes through him like lightning, that he’s changed, transmuted, still trembling.

Lynon’s apartment has a balcony full of potted plants. He changes into shorts and a t-shirt and leans against the railing, rubbing his shins against the leaves of a trailing vine, sipping from a bottle of chilled mineral water. One of Lynon’s roommates, Veera, offered it to him with an awed and slightly fearful expression. He can hear them discussing him through the partially closed screen door.

Lynon and her roommates live near Rue des Teinturiers, above a Domino’s Pizza, of all things. The buildings are newer here, taller, but most still keep the red-shingled roofs that are so distinctive of the south: undulating red clay in every direction, as far as the eye can see, with steeples here and there jutting up like spikes. The air smells like dough. He watches a delivery driver swinging astride a scooter and zooming down the street only to be stopped by a red light.

He starts a message to Axel.

_This thing with Charlie, I don’t understand it, I’m not going to try. If you want to see me again, tell me. Otherwise—_

He deletes “Otherwise.” He leaves it at that. He hits send.

In the morning, the message is marked read. There is no reply.

He stays the entire first week of August in Avignon, sleeping on Lynon’s couch and following her from attraction to attraction, arm in arm, joking about dodging Potterheads and paparazzi. He checks his phone every five minutes, but there’s nothing but work. That Friday, Agathe calls to invite him to Vattetot-sur-Mer, where Pierre’s family has a holiday cottage, but he declines and returns to Paris.

The movie goes into post, cast interviews are scheduled, and the identity of his Perenelle is revealed at last. Her name is Sara Fleurot, and she’s another newcomer, a dark-haired beauty with sharp cheekbones and a charmingly crooked smile. He finds her on Instagram—a private account. Lynon is already following her. A scheme was hatched between the two sisters, to send Lynon to Beauxbatons in Perenelle’s stead, while Perenelle remained in her forest tower to study the Dark Arts. It turns out that Lynon has already filmed several scenes with her, months ago in Aubervilliers, and they’ve been in touch all the while.

_You see? _Lynon says. _I don't give away every spoiler._ Then she confesses: _When I saw her at our first reading I thought my heart was going to stop. No__t from nerves, but…you know._

Catching up on her texts in his apartment, with Brian lazing in his tank and a new crystal mobile rotating lazily overhead, he has to smile, rueful. He wonders if Lynon plans to explore this feeling or dance right over it. He didn't tell anyone about Axel, at first. He kept it close, his own precious, bewildering secret—that boy, those eyes, the fluttering in his stomach.

_I know_, he says.

He’s spent the afternoon away from his phone, with Joris and Joris’ new girlfriend, Camille, a much smaller version of Sara, with a beauty mark on her chin. They met for the first time on the fifteenth of August, at Camille’s favorite bistro in the Marais, and he knew she liked him from the moment she laid eyes on him; she’d looked him over from head to toe and cut him a slice of quiche from her own plate.

“Well?” Joris had said. “Are you ready to give him up? We’ll look after you. Camille is ready to spoil you.”

“She’ll feed me until I burst.” It’s serious with Camille, he knows: Joris has introduced her to his family, has started talking, offhandedly, about finding a larger apartment for the three of them, meaning himself and Camille and Camille’s small white dog. And all of this happened while he was scrambling around the Pyrenees, feeding the mosquitos and going cross-eyed with longing for someone who’s probably blocked his number.

Lynon is still gushing. _You know she has me saved in her phone as Little Sister? I adore her, seriously. It’s easy to see why Lynon would do anything for her. _

_Lynon the character, that is,_ Lynon clarifies._ Not me._

He thumbs away from their chat to post a video of the rainbows swirling around his bedroom.

_I have your hat,_ Axel says. _Caro mailed it to me._

He stares at his screen. It’s Friday, 28 August, 20:27. Nearly a month since Avignon, a month of absolute silence. His eyes are glued to his own last message, sent just after midnight twenty-eight days ago. _If you want to see me again, tell me._

The mobile spins. Rainbows glide over the dusty floral canopy of Axel’s umbrella. He moved it from beneath his desk to his bookshelf just last week, absentmindedly, so that he could sweep the floor.

_That was kind of her, _he says. _I have your umbrella_. _I’ll swing by._

Axel types and types. Then he says, _Okay._

He remembers the look on Axel’s face as he left him on the steps of the Palace Theater, beneath a blue dusk bleeding into an inky black sky: blank, staring, his body rigid, the look of someone paralyzed, with a cry trapped in his throat.

_Tonight’s fine? You’re not at your mother’s?_

_Tonight’s fine._

He thinks back to Mathilde’s two boxes of possessions, how the palettes of makeup and designer jackets were worth more than a month’s rent, how they were so numerous, and he lost count of the brushes, the tubes, the spangles and paillettes; how the corners of each box dug into his forearms like blades as he carried them outside to the curb, where Simon and Natalia were waiting with their car. “Careful,” he’d said to Simon, before handing them over, and yet he’d felt nothing but a curious lightness from start to finish. And now here he is in agony over a dollar store hat. It costs nothing, weighs nothing, but the weight of it will slam him into the ground.

At nine, he sets off, Axel’s umbrella tucked under his arm.


	5. it will make us happy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We did it! We made it! When you reach the end, imagine "[Quelqu'un m'a dit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syIJoYeKU7A)" playing.
>
>> On me dit que nos vies ne valent pas grand chose  
Elles passent en un instant comme fanent les roses  
On me dit que le temps qui glisse est un salaud  
Que de nos chagrins il s'en fait des manteaux
>> 
>> Pourtant quelqu'un m'a dit  
Que tu m'aimais encore  
C'est quelqu'un qui m'a dit que tu m'aimais encore  
Serait-ce possible alors?
> 
> Thank you so very much for reading.

He’s recognized on the métro by a trio of women, his age or older. Their eyes flick down, up, at each other, at their phones. _Is that—? Is he—? _They’re on the far end of the carriage, and when he glances at them, they look quickly away. He remembers the girls who followed him home all those years ago, cameras at the ready, and starts to feel agitated. Not tonight, he thinks: don’t get in my way tonight. And then he grows paranoid; he worries the train will come grinding to a halt in the tunnel, that some debris, some mechanical failure, will keep him from the eleventh arrondissement, from the linden trees and the milky blue vase in the concierge’s window and whatever flowers it holds now, and from Axel—Axel—_Axel_.

So when they pull into Menilmontant, he slams open the doors and flings himself onto the platform before the train comes to a full stop. When his foot hits the platform, he almost falls; he catches himself, staggers, and begins to run, pushing past people who are also running, but in the other direction, toward the train doors. They close ranks in his wake, securing his escape.

It’s another kilometer and a half to Axel’s apartment from the station, and he covers the distance erratically, sometimes running, sometimes walking. It was a bright, sunny day, and the evening continues to be cloudless, and he is the only person on the sidewalk with an umbrella, still jammed tightly in his armpit, swishing and burning under the friction of his quick-swinging arm. He feels as though the umbrella’s printed flowers are growing into his side, giant black and white roses gouging through the taut muscle between his ribs, thorns piercing his organs.

Then, all of a sudden, it’s over: he’s creeping past the linden trees in the darkness, and he can see the pale curve of the vase in the window, and beneath it, pacing on the stoop—

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Axel says.

“Are those daisies?”

“What?” Axel follows his gaze upward. “Oh. I don’t know. Maybe.” He shifts back and forth, and the streetlights glow softly on his hair and eyes and the metal drawstring tips of his joggers. “Listen,” he says, “do you have some time? Do you want to come up?”

Yes, Maxence thinks, but to what purpose? To sit on your sofa and listen to you talk about nothing, or worse, about Charlie, whom you keep trying to conjure up like a ghost?

“Or—” Axel wavers. “Your hat’s upstairs,” he says, quietly. “I’ll get it. Hang on.”

“No, wait,” he says. “I’ll come.”

The stairs seem to swell and shrink beneath his feet as he follows Axel up. He grips the banister hard and stares at the back of Axel’s head, trying to memorize the sight of it, Axel’s wild hair, the red tips of Axel’s ears and the quick rise and fall of his shoulders. On the stoop, Axel had sighed, and as he climbs the steps he wonders what it means, that exhalation.

The door is unlocked; Axel nudges it open.

He tugs the umbrella from the crook of his arm, feeling like he’s dislodging his heart and lungs; he holds it out.

“Here.”

Axel doesn’t take it. “Come in,” he says. “Won’t you? Just—just for a little.”

The view of Axel’s apartment from the foyer is much the same as before: sneakers heaped on the shoe rack, the dog bed, powder blue, the upright piano, polished to a high gloss and shining under the light of a tall standing lamp. On the coffee table, he sees a pile of papers, a torn-open parcel. Axel slides toward the sofa in his socks and throws himself down and waits while Maxence unlaces his boots. He can feel Axel’s eyes on him, lidded, staring. He pulls his right foot out, then his left.

“I’m sorry,” Axel says.

He straightens up carefully. “About?”

“Well—Avignon. But mainly about—about Charlie.” He’s right on the edge of the sofa, Maxence sees, perched, ready to leap up again, and—what? he thinks. Run away? The door of the apartment is ajar, bleeding light into the hallway. He reaches back and closes it.

Axel had swayed when his hand made contact with the doorknob, a little lurch, a little jump: _Don’t go_. He sits back now and turns his wide eyes to the floor. His feet and ankles flex in their low-cut white socks. He clasps his hands.

“Well?”

“It was a lie. It…” He breaks off and gestures at the box on the coffee table. “Your hat,” he says. “Caro…last week.”

An unexpected Cupid, Maxence thinks, Caro. He’s forgotten her face and can only remember the silver bowl of her bobbed hair and her oversized red earrings, like plastic cherries, as vividly, violently red as the two blotches in Axel’s cheeks. Axel drags the box into his lap before setting it back down on the table.

“Can I get you something?” Axel says. “Coffee, maybe?”

“Coffee? Now?”

“It’s decaf. Five minutes. Don’t go.”

“Axel. _Axel_. Fuck—”

“Spill your guts,” Joris had said, when Maxence had texted him, frantic. _He wants to see me._ “Tell him everything, pour your heart out. In fact, don’t go. Stay until he gets used to you.”

_Come on._

_I’m not joking_, Joris had said. _Make him look at you._

But Axel’s bolted from the sofa and into the kitchen. The noise of the coffee grinder drowns him out. This is a comedy, he thinks. Fine: he’ll stay until curtain and ambush the leading man at the stage door. He looks at the coffee table—hat, magazines, scripts, sheet music, a wad of receipts—and follows the amber trace of light down a table leg, over the hardwood floor, onto a foot pedal. The piano lid is pushed back; maybe Axel’s been playing. There’s Beethoven in the music rack, Sonata No. 27 in E Minor. The pages are old and yellow. He can’t read the notes. He’s strummed some chords on a guitar after Axel showed him where to put his fingers; he’s puffed exuberantly into a harmonica while his friends guffawed and blew smoke rings and cheered him on. There are little scribbles here and there in very light pencil, Axel’s annotations. He pushes the last white key on the board and wonders which note he’s just played.

Atop the piano there are pictures in heavy white minimalist frames: Axel’s mother, Axel’s grandmother when she was young, Ouba when she was no larger than a human fist, all fluff. A cast photo of people he doesn’t recognize with Axel grinning at the center of them. A playbill. A ring.

In Seoul, the morning after he’d encountered Axel in the hotel lobby, he’d gotten lost on his way into Hongdae. And even after that, after he’d flagged down a taxi and delivered himself to the studio, he’d been distracted, slow to react, cycling mechanically through the same five or six poses. When at last the finished pictures had arrived in his inbox, his narrowed eyes glaring above a column of parkas in primary colors, he’d barely been able to look at them, embarrassed by his behavior, by the memory of that week. At the time, they’d waved away his apologies and made excuses for him, Park Sung-hi, Lee Jung-eun, Katie Y., Katie K.; they’d all been so kind, murmuring about jetlag, stomach pains, nerves. Don’t worry, Jung-eun had said, bringing him a cup of hot tea, it happens to all of us.

The ring on the piano is plain silver, with indentations here and there to show that it was beaten into shape by hand. He wore it every day on his left index finger until he lost it in Seoul, by being absentminded and later heartbroken, or so he thought. He’d lost a lot of things in October, hats, gloves, a scarf, other rings, and Joris had teased him, while Simon and Thibault had taken turns giving him bracing claps on the back, thinking it was because of Mathilde.

He remembers now how he’d twisted it from his finger and set it on the bedside table, and how he and Axel had watched it roll into the carpet.

Maybe it’s a mistake, a dupe. Someone else’s ring. But even as he tries to entertain the possibility, he picks the ring up and slides it on.

It fits; of course it fits: it was custom-made for him by Émilien Firmin, to be worn with four others and a short, dense chain that coiled over his collarbones like a snake’s tail; when he lifted it from the piano he saw the EF etched in the silver underbelly of the band.

He sees himself leaving Axel’s hotel room, in such a hurry that his shirt’s inside out, sees Axel staring after him, closing the door. Hesitating by the bed, not wanting to climb back in. The sheets are rumpled, warm, maybe wet. To lie back down is to remember. To lie back down is to feel the lingering heat of him, Maxence, in the bed like a phantom. He watches Axel as he looks at the mess and bites his lip and notices, at the foot of the table, a gleam…

He returns to his body, to the present, to the smell of coffee in his nostrils and his thundering heart and Axel just behind him, whispering something about milk or sugar. The whisper fades as Axel sees his hands.

“I should have cut a lock of your hair, too, that night,” Axel says. “Well, if you’d had any.” His voice is light, but he isn’t smiling; he looks terrified.

“Do you want one?” he says.

“Maxe—”

“I’m serious. Cut it now. Take it. Whatever you want.” He advances. “Tell me what you want. I’m here in front of you. I’ll give it to you.”

The ring warms against his skin; it’s part of him again; in another moment, he’ll forget it’s there. He wonders how Axel transported it back to Paris. In a pocket, or a pouch, or his backpack. On his finger. It would have to have been his thumb. He must have looked at it while he was practicing his Beethoven, must have paused every now and then to slip it on. His hat has been in Caro’s box on the coffee table for a week, maybe two, and the box has been torn open, and he sees in another flash of omniscience that Axel has taken it out to fondle it, has held it in his hand, has rubbed it between his fingers and pressed his nose to it, his eyes shut.

“If you lied about Charlie to make me jealous,” he says, “it worked. If you did it to hurt me, it worked.”

Axel gulps. He says, rapidly, “I didn’t do it to hurt you. I swear. I just thought it would be easier, easier for both of us, to pretend, to…fuck, just…” He’s on the verge of wringing his hands. “Stay, okay? Please stay, please.”

He steps closer. A millimeter more and they’ll collide. “I’m not going anywhere. To pretend what?”

“That it was nothing. Just a fling.”

_That _hurts. It hurts so much that he hisses as he inhales. He’s red-eyed, he knows, enraged and nearly in tears. A fling, he thinks. You had it all along: my ring, my heart, every part of me. “It wasn’t,” he says. “You know it wasn’t. I loved you. I loved you, and if I could take it back, I would, about the fucking Besson movie; in a heartbeat, Axel, only I can’t.”

Axel mouths the words. “You loved me.”

“Then and now. And you talk about Charlie. Always Charlie. And you kept my ring.” He’s not making any sense. He’s choking. “My ring,” he says again, thick, “all this time, fuck, I—”

He swipes at his eyelids, feeling the metal glide of the ring between his knuckles, and then, abruptly, the sweaty press of Axel’s hands, pushing his aside, cupping his face, his ears, wiping his eyes for him.

“I love you,” he says, “Axel, I love you.”

“You can’t say that.” Axel’s voice is low and unsteady. His hands are trembling. “Hush. Shh. Fuck. Fuck, Maxence.”

“If you tell me you don’t feel the same way, I won’t believe you.” Axel kisses him: his cheek, his pulse, the corner of his mouth, the edges of his palms, still curled loosely at his chest. “If you lie again I’ll never forgive you.”

Axel says, “From the moment I saw you. But Maxence, this could wreck you.”

“What,” he says, snapping, irritable. Axel is brushing his shoulders, weakly, over and over, petting him, still trembling; it’s nice, but not nearly enough. “What could wreck me, what do you mean?”

“If anyone finds out. I understand about Besson. I told you I did. Remember? It’s forgiven, it was long ago. You didn’t want to be typecast. And look how it turned out, in the end: you’re a star. Think what this will do.”

“It will make us happy.”

“It will mean your phone never rings again.”

“That’s bullshit, Axel.”

“I’ve seen it happen. It’s different for the theater. But movies, blockbusters…you can’t be open about these things, you have to tease people, keep them guessing. Charlie and I—” he winces, plows on “—Charlie and I, we had an arrangement. She and I are like family,” he says, “we began our careers together, our mothers are best friends. She understood. She—”

“Shut up about Charlie,” he says, through clenched teeth. “Enough about Charlie. We managed quite well, during SKAM. We kept everyone guessing. No one had a clue. You heard Robin, he thinks it was all a big joke.”

“And afterward?”

“Afterward what?”

“Afterward, you walked away.”

“I wish I hadn’t,” he says. “I wish I hadn’t.”

“It was the right thing to do,” Axel says. “I didn’t see it then. I do now.”

“So now what?” he says. “What do you want, Axel? Do you want me to walk away again? Do you want to leave it all in the past? Is that what you want? You can’t keep your fucking hands off me.”

Axel flinches at that. He looks down like he’s only just realizing where his hands are, who he’s touching. He pulls away.

“Is that what you want?” he repeats.

“I want to be _friends_,” Axel says, “I want—we can still—”

“We can’t. After today, there’s nothing. It hurts me to see you.”

“Maxe. Please.”

“We’ll leave it where it stopped. Somewhere between the last take and Avignon. You decide. You can have your fond memories. I won’t contact you again. Can you live like that?”

The question hangs between them. Axel stands there staring, empty-handed, wretched: speechless.

The silence is a blade; he feels it angled at his throat.

“Okay. Okay. Fuck. Okay.” He backs away. “You can. I understand. I’ll go.”

“Maxe—”

“I’ll leave this here,” he says, pulling viciously at the ring, “I’ll leave it, in _friendship_, something to remember me by—” It went on smoothly enough, but it isn’t cooperating now, like a magic fucking ring meant to imprison its owner. He’ll cut his finger off, he thinks. The kitchen is right there. But he goes to the door, still tugging at his finger. Why did he wear boots with laces? He won’t bother tying them. He’ll shove his feet in and trip down the stairs, and when he snaps his ankle they’ll have to get someone else to be Flamel, Victor fucking Meutelet again.

“Maxe, wait. Maxe. _Maxe_—” When he touches the doorknob, Axel bats his hand away from it, and when he turns to shout, Axel grabs him by the shirt and kisses him.

He puts his hands on Axel’s shoulders, and Axel _clings_ to him, pulls at him until he staggers, until they stumble—against the coffee table, the piano; he doesn’t know or care. Axel swears and sinks down amid an avalanche of papers, still pulling, and Maxence follows him sideways into the velvet softness of the sofa. The light shivers above them; they’ve jostled the lamp. He chases Axel’s mouth and presses him into the cushions, feels the purr of Axel’s sweatpants sliding against him, against his calf, his thigh.

“I can’t,” Axel says, again and again between kisses. “I can’t, I can’t live like that. If you leave I’ll die. If you leave…”

He’s hard already, and Maxence wants to tease him—_a minute ago you were ready to give me up forever_—but there’s a lump in his throat, painful enough that he can’t make a sound, can’t smile, can’t even laugh.

“Say something,” Axel says. His fingers curl into Maxence’s hair. “Say something,” he begs, and, as Maxence swallows, “don’t leave.”

“Do I look like I’m leaving?”

He watches Axel’s mouth drop at the rough scrape of his voice, watches the darkening of Axel’s eyes, from blue to midnight. He leans in. “Axel,” he murmurs, into Axel’s ear, just to feel him jolt.

“Fuck,” Axel whispers.

“I love you.”

“_Fuck_,” Axel says, and Maxence feels him twitch. He works his arm between them and massages Axel with the heel of his hand, and Axel gasps and presses his mouth to Maxence’s shoulder. Then he turns his head and moans.

He rubs his thumb over Axel’s hipbone, his waistband. Axel wriggles unhelpfully on the sofa while Maxence fumbles at his drawstrings.

“Here, let me,” Axel begins. He tries to raise himself to his elbows and falls back with a groan as Maxence gives up on the drawstrings and yanks his sweatpants and briefs down in a single aggrieved tug. “Shit—_fuck_—”

At the first stroke, Axel reacts like he’s been electrocuted. His body arches; his legs jerk. He cries out: _Maxe. _He writhes under Maxence’s hand, head tossing; his mouth slides against his own forearm, his wrist. He bites at his knuckles. His eyes are open, fluttering, staring down at the shining red crown of his cock sliding in and out of Maxence’s fist. He watches and gulps. “Maxe. Maxe. _Maxe_—”

He closes his hand over the head as Axel comes, feels the warm rush against his palm.

Still shuddering, still rubbing himself feebly against Maxence’s hand, Axel wraps his arms around him and kisses him. “Wipe it on me, my shirt, it’s fine,” he says, panting; he takes Maxence by the wrist and does it for him, dragging Maxence’s tingling hand across his chest.

He sits up to pull his own shirt over his head. Axel’s, too; they help each other and toss their clothes onto the floor.

“I don’t have any left,” Axel says.

“What?”

“I don’t—you know—” A lowered glance at the only closed door in the apartment, one that Maxence assumes leads to the bathroom; a guilty glance at themselves, at his own spread legs and glistening cock, at Maxence, straining under black briefs. “Condoms and…”

He was flushed already, Axel, red from forehead to chest. He trails off and bites his lip.

“The Franprix,” he suggests. “I walked by one, earlier…what time does it close?” Then he feels like an ass. Axel is looking around for his phone. “It’s okay,” Maxence says, stalling him. “I don’t need any. I mean—what I mean is, I don’t need to—” But he thinks about Axel’s legs around him and Axel crying out beneath him, Axel’s fingers digging into his shoulders, his back; the heat, the clench. He wants it. He wants it so much that all the air in Axel’s apartment seems to turn to syrup: he tries to breathe and gasps instead.

“Tomorrow,” Axel says. “Stay over tonight, and tomorrow…”

“Axel—” He smiles; it feels unhinged. If he could open his jaw wide enough, he’d swallow Axel whole. “Axel, I can’t wait another night. I’ll explode.”

“I want it,” Axel says. “I want to. I want to feel you.” He sits up, rocking forward on his knees until he’s straddling Maxence’s lap.

He squeezes the taut back of Axel’s thigh with one hand, brushes a sweat-damp lock of hair from Axel’s eyes with the other. Axel smiles at him. His gaze looks wet. Maxence thinks: if you’re trying to prove something, it isn’t necessary; I forgive you; I’m sorry I shouted.

Axel reaches down. When Maxence curses, he tightens his grip. He says, grinning, “You can explode if you want.”

He does, more or less: with Axel kneeling between his legs, touching him with both hands, telling him matter-of-factly that he can’t wait either, that he’s been dreaming of this, of Maxence buried in him, so deep he can feel it in his throat; with Axel licking the rim of his ear—_come for me, Maxe, I love you too_—he lasts what seems like all of thirty seconds. Afterward, they’re both embarrassed, Maxence over his performance and Axel over the things he’s said.

“The heat of the moment,” he suggests, as they stand side by side, naked, in Axel’s kitchen, drinking their cold decaf.

“Yes,” Axel says, and then, “no. No, I should have said it. All of it, from the very beginning. I’ve left a mark on your neck.”

“Oh?” He rubs at his throat.

“The other side. Has the publicity tour started? When you go to your next event, make sure…”

“Cast interview,” he says. “And that’s not for another week.”

“Oh,” Axel says; he sips and is quiet, and Maxence thinks he can hear Axel parsing it, repeating it to himself. _Not for another week._ Not for another week: plenty of time for this mark, and any others Axel wants to give him, to heal.

“Agathe invited me to Vattetot-sur-Mer,” he says. “She has a house there, a cottage...It’s not up to your usual standard, I guess, but you’d be welcome.”

“Agathe?” Axel looks at him, questioning; he shakes his head.

“Agathe doesn’t know.”

“Will she take it badly?”

“She always asks after you, you know.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“I don’t know how she’ll take it,” he says, “but I don’t plan to hide it. Not among friends. Well. Joris already knows. I won’t tell the rest, but I won’t hide it from them, either. I don’t think I can.”

“Call yourself an actor,” Axel mutters into his mug, red-cheeked.

If I tell Lynon, she’ll tell everyone, he thinks. He pictures whispering it to her behind a cupped hand. _About Axel…_ She’ll shriek.

“Do you remember the first time we fucked?” he asks.

Axel makes an exaggerated choking sound, gargling coffee. “Fuck, what a question. Of course I do. You still had paint in your ear. It tasted like shit.”

“It got on your bedsheets.” He’s sure Axel has different sheets now. He’ll get to see them in a moment. He smiles. “But I mean the first time we went all the way. Do you remember?”

That golden afternoon in autumn, the sudden hush, the lull in traffic, a balm for his ears after the pounding music of the Season 4 wrap-up party the night before; the way Axel had smiled at him when he returned from the Monoprix. _Got it? Yeah._

“I don’t want it to be like this,” Axel says.

“Hm?”

“Constant reminiscing. Do you remember this and that. Calling me Lucas.”

He remembers the blustery day in Haute-Normandie, Axel’s sharp little inhalation on the phone, his tender whisper: _Eliott. _“You’ve called me Eliott before.”

“I thought it was the only way to reach you,” Axel says. “To remind you of what we had, when I thought it was over. Now it’s different. Now I know…” He sets his mug down and turns. His eyes are very blue. “I had a dream,” he says.

“We’ve been over that,” Maxence says, kissing him with a smile. “Tomorrow I’ll make your dreams come true.”

“You’re annoying,” Axel says, huffing. “This was a different dream. This happened in March. I was in Nantes. I dreamed there was a plague, a new one. It swept over the entire world. Spain, Italy, France. Paris. No one could touch anyone else and we all had to hide away in our homes, not touching, not speaking, until God knows when. In the dream they sent me to live in Deauville with my grandmother.” He pauses and looks wistful. “Which is how I knew it was a dream. Anyway, it’s a nice house, my uncle lives there now, with a big green field and a hundred-year-old tree.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I was so sad.” He takes Maxence’s hand, squeezes it, squeezes the ring. “I wondered where you were.”

“Imprisoned in my old garret, maybe,” he says. He squeezes back. “Or roaming free on the moon.”

“I was dying to see you,” Axel says. “That’s all.”

They brush their teeth. At two o’clock they go to bed. It smells like Axel, the sheets, the pillows. Axel lies on top of him, half-hard, drowsing. The curtains are open; the window, too, and he hears something like the noise of a bicycle whizzing down the street. “I can’t sleep,” he tells Axel. “I’m too happy. I’m so happy, Axel.” He guides Axel’s hand to his heart. “See?” But he falls asleep soon after, blackness closing over his eyes like shutters.

In the morning, he goes to Franprix, wearing Axel’s sunglasses and his own hat. It starts to drizzle on his way back. He bounds onto the stoop, whistling, skips up the stairs, unlocks the door with Axel’s keys. Joris has texted: _As I haven’t heard from you, I’ll assume one of two outcomes. Either you’ve thrown yourself into the Seine or you’ve been chained to the bed._

He sends a peace sign and a heart. Joris replies, in capital letters, _IT’S ABOUT FUCKING TIME._

He texts Agathe. _Are you still by the sea?_

Axel says, “You bought oranges?”

“For your basket,” he says, indicating the empty fruit bowl on Axel’s counter. He tucks his phone away. “Croissants, too.” He stopped by a boulangerie, called _Utopie_, of all things; he took a picture of the sign and posted it to Instagram. He’s been floating since he woke up, he thinks. His feet haven’t touched the ground in hours.

“Croissants later,” Axel says. His hair is sticking straight up. Maxence runs his fingers through it. Axel puts his arms around his neck.

In bed, he pulls Axel into his lap and fingers him until he’s loose and panting and turns him over to fuck him. Axel mewls when he enters him and tries to cover his mouth. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says, and reaches back to touch himself, but Maxence takes his hands and presses them into the mattress. “Please, let me, please, I want,” Axel says, and Maxence tuts at him, locks their fingers together, says, “Not yet.” Axel’s arms give out; he sinks onto his belly with a moan, and Maxence plunges greedily after him. Later, cleaning up, he’ll notice the wet patch on Axel’s pillow, a bit of cream a little darker than the rest: spit or tears or both. Eventually, Axel begs prettily enough to be allowed to turn over again; he comes after four brisk strokes of Maxence’s hand, and his fingers scratch white lines into Maxence’s back.

He admires them later in Axel’s bathroom mirror, his body still throbbing: after Axel, he came so hard he saw stars. Axel is already in the shower, his second of the day.

_Yes,_ Agathe says, _until the 31st. Are you coming?! Julie will be so excited!_

_Can I bring a guest?_

_Of course! As many as you want._

_Just one_, he says.

_Oh? _She sends him a face with suspicious eyes. _I’ll leave you the key after we clear out. Stay as long as you like._

“Maxe?” The shower door rasps on its track as Axel teases it open. His heart seizes at the sight of Axel’s face: upturned, a little hesitant. He imagines that face turning to him between the blurred blue-gray lines of sea and sky, as Axel wades into the Channel. It won’t happen that way, probably: Axel will run in bellowing and run back out again, with seawater in his hands, screaming about the cold, ready to splash him. He wonders what Agathe will say when she meets them at the station.

“Coming,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you liked, please [reblog](https://hallo-catfish.tumblr.com/post/611334162985697280/in-the-territory-of-plausible-deniability)!


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